Anxiety in Teaching

 Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I leave my classroom feeling certain that I have said something that will end my career*. I think through everything I said. I gloss through each chatty or digressive moment. I flinch and gasp as I drive home, wondering what people who see my face must think of me, grimacing to myself.**

I have said things I shouldn't have, and the consequences were catastrophic professionally, personally, and interpersonally. Consequences are necessary, but must they necessarily be nuclear? I needed to learn to see things from my students' perspectives, to understand how to make the room safe for learning. Not all of us come by that knowledge instinctively, and not everybody's primary discourse is conducive to teaching. But what is the point of learning if my supervisor says, "You're not going to try to teach again, are you," inflecting it as a recommendation rather than a question? What could I have said? I agreed that it wasn't for me, and gave up before I had even started.

And yet here I am, smiling and joking with my students three days a week, and then driving home gasping with the pain of knowing I made another mistake. Certain of it, but unable to pinpoint the error except where the pain begins under my lungs, in my stomach, where it will run through my digestive system like bleach for the next two days.

I am not a natural teacher. My process is fraught and full of landmines, and students have been easily mislead about what I am doing and why, even when I embrace transparency. Perhaps especially then. There are valuable reasons somebody invented distortion glass.

But even distortion lets light through. I love my students. I cannot control them into getting the A's I want them to have along with the new information and skills that I am offering. But I can make sure that they know that I care about them anyway. I cannot give them more than the University pays me to do, but I can make that time and that work guided by my best instincts.

Those best instincts are based on my love and care for them, not on the fear that I may have said something wrong. These two things are not unrelated. I need to know and remember that what I say casually might do real harm, but speaking from that fear (even fear of doing harm to students I genuinely care about) will make me more likely to misspeak. It turns my focus inward and to the negative, and makes me less likely to say the right thing. 

By turning outwards, by speaking with love and vulnerability and a strong desire to share my hard-earned education, my enthusiasm for the subject, and above all, the ability to listen passionately, I grow. Instead of shrinking myself into a tiny, defensive box outlined by lawyers and public opinion, I can burst out and benefit those around me. I can overflow with teaching.

Growing things, like my teaching style, need guidance (just ask the basil). 

Endnotes:

*Adjuncting is not a career.

**I hope they don't think I'm scowling at them. Driving in Idaho in January isn't easy, and we're all doing our best, I hope. My terror and disgust isn't about them or their driving.