In this post, J. Sumerau asks us to consider and reflect upon what teaching feels like and how such feelings may vary and / or be illustrative in relation to different people, approaches, and social locations.
This week I experience one of my favorite times of the year – the beginning of classes for a new academic year. As I walk to and through campus, all the signs are there that a new year has begun. Some of the students are excited, others are nervous, and still more seem just plain lost as they look around for some kind of guidance. Some of the faculty are bouncing around with glee, others appear annoyed beyond belief, and still more are arguing about parking. I always experience a mixture of fear and exhilaration personally, which I figured I’d write about for a bit since it makes me wonder about variations in how teaching feels for different people.
In terms of fear, I find myself locking up – physically, emotionally, and even mentally – this time of year with anxiety about the fact that I must talk to and deal with people constantly from this point forward after a summer usually spent mostly in isolation – or as some friends say “hiding in my cave.” While my students rarely believe it until they see me outside of school, I’m not very social and interpersonal interactions are often very difficult for me to navigate so when I’m able to I simply avoid interacting with people (I prefer to watch them from a distance so to speak as I roam around cities alone listening to random conversations and / or whatever records I’m interested in at the moment). There may be nothing more awkward in my daily or normal routines than the thought of speaking to a room full of people and / or making small talk in a given hallway, and yet these are two of the most common elements of my occupational experience.
Companions who understand this about me sometimes express surprise that I love teaching as a way to make a living and spend my time. The answer lies in the other side of the coin – constantly doing something terrifying is in many ways exhilarating and never boring for me. My life – especially the parts that require human interaction and communication not accomplished via typing – feels like a constant adventure, a kind of boxing match between my fear of people and my desire not to be ruled by fear. While I have friends who spend days and hours deciding exactly what to say and do in classes, I almost never have any clue which of twenty or more outlined directions any given class might go. If I try to be more specific than that – as I learned by trying to do so in graduate school – I lock up, have a panic attack, and can’t speak. For whatever reason, deciding exactly what to say ahead of time creates more anxiety because I then worry about going off script or forgetting something important so – in much the same way I approach presentations at conferences – I instead come up with a bunch of different possible scenarios and then read my audience for cues as to what might be fun and useful (i.e., the same way I navigate interpersonal interactions outside the classroom).
If there is anything I have learned over the years, it is that there may be an unlimited amount of ways to teach well, experience classrooms, and manage the self and the class in educational endeavors. From the colleague I know that designs a specific game for each concept to the colleague I know that maps out every possible student response so ze has an example and / or resource ready at hand at all times, people prepare and experience classrooms in a wide variety of ways. From the colleague that giggles whenever anyone says “course prep” because ze does not do any of that “boring stuff” and instead uses improv experience to run classrooms based on topics ze already knows well to the colleague who spends the entire summer preparing detailed and sophisticated lectures with graphs and charts because the structure eases their own anxiety about talking in public, the spectrum of possible approaches suggests – and I admit I’ve benefited from personally thanks to countless conversations with others on the matter – a wealth of information to be found sharing teaching approaches, experiences, and styles with one another.
These simple observations about the experience of and approaches to teaching lead me to wonder how others experience these dynamics. While rarely mentioned or written about (that I have seen) aside from social media posts here and there and online groups where teachers share frustrations and celebrations during the year, the way it feels to teach is likely a fascinating topic and would likely reveal a lot about the ways educators navigate the world and their lives within it. As I continue enjoying the fear and exhilaration of my own latest week one, I thus ask us all to reflect on what it feels like to teach and what lessons we could learn about teaching and ourselves from such reflection.
In some ways I’m about as far from this as it comes, I suppose. I love teaching because I love meeting new people, telling them stories, holding their attention, making them laugh and sometimes cry, and encouraging them to explore and discover. I grew up on the stage and I guess I never lost the sense of thrill and fulfillment that comes from performing, whether I’m improvising or doing a thoughtfully “prepped” bit of lecture.
I never think about staying “on script” because what matters to me is responding to my audience. If they’re raptly attentive and wanting more, wide-eyed and leaning forwards, I give them more. If they’re showing signs of wanting to move on to the next topic, moving their eyes a lot or leaning back, I move on or flip the dialogue to a discussion activity. I love it when students interrupt me to ask a question. I love it even more when they grin and bounce in their seats at the answer.
I love it when I do something ridiculous like throw the whiteboard eraser because my hand spasms, or lose my voice in the middle of a sentence because my throat is so swollen. These are teachable moments that also make me human to my students, and let them know I’m a safe space for the things they themselves have felt compelled to keep hidden. I don’t know what it means to be embarrassed in front of an audience. Frankly, the most embarrassing thing I could think of would be standing rigidly behind a podium and just droning on. I move; I gesture; I wind through the room.
Sometimes a couple of students roll their eyes at first. They’re the best challenge. It’s like being a stand-up comedian in those cases–you versus the audience, but your ultimate goal is to coax a laugh out of them. When they laugh with you, or get inspired by something you’ve said, or just get so furiously curious that they can’t help but pay attention, you’ve got them. If there’s a graph on the screen, it’s a prop for the story you’re telling. And at least in my experience, if you let your excitement show, students will hang on the edges of their seats to hear you tell that story. As a species, as a culture, we love suspense.
Format matters to me, but more in terms of appropriateness to the circumstances than of some grand idea of “best practices” in teaching. Form follows function in my case. I can give a two-hour lecture with no prep or a 15-minute presentation with several slides and pre-chosen examples. I feel equally comfortable with both and recognize that I’m going to prefer one format or the other depending on the definition of the situation.
I’m also comfortable with teaching scenarios that require more listening than talking, like the small groups I lead when I work with medical students. There’s still laughter and suspense, but the trick of that is to give just enough cues to encourage students to get into the moment and back up their claims with a good story, whether about “big data” or lived experience. There’s so much joy in getting to know the students–their personalities, their strengths, their challenges, their goals, and the undersides of all those things they won’t show to many people.
Sometimes it’s overwhelming to have a student burst into my office and begin with “I’ve never told anyone this before, but…” and proceed to tell a wrenching story through a haze of tears. But it’s a privilege to be the one they come to in those moments, which often are the best learning opportunities for me in becoming a better teacher. I’m exhausted at the end of a day like that too, but in the wired sort of way that makes me want to do it all over again. There’s a sort of high that comes with giving my all in teaching. That might be a product of living with hypomania, or it might simply be the almost surreal fulfillment of actually being able to use my own history to touch the lives of others.
Either way, the feelings I get from teaching are irreplaceable and precious to me–the thrill of anticipating a great class meeting, the exuberance of watching my students shine in the classroom, and the satisfaction of smiling faces bounding up to the podium as a session winds down. Not all of them will become medical sociologists, or even do another degree after college. That’s hardly the point anyway. For those moments we share, I give them an opportunity to discover how fun school can be. It’s a spark that will follow them wherever they go, and hopefully light the path.
I really like your approach and thanks for sharing it, j
Thanks for this. Every year – every autumn, certainly, less so in the winter (“spring”) – I wonder whether I can do it again. Teaching is hard, especially for someone whose energy comes from being alone. I love it and I do it because I love so much about it. But I know that I am trading more and more to be able to be in the classroom. This year already my energy drain – simply from teaching a handful of 50-minute classes – seems unrecoverable. Thanks for giving voice to the real, human element of this.
You’re welcome, and I feel a similar drain. I love teaching, but the difficulty of it for me (as you put it, someone whose energy comes from being alone) is always right there along side the joy, j
I’m now wondering about strategies that other readers use to recharge after a long and/or intense day of teaching. Maybe we can have some “share your tips” posts specifically on self-care and recovering one’s energy as we continue to develop the blog?
I get a big boost from teaching itself, but sometimes trying to respond to inquiries from a dozen different students who swarm me after class is overwhelming because I’m trying to listen to everything every person has to say all at once. Having folks form some semblance of a line and go one at a time helps, but I do find it useful to let my mind wander on my walk back over to the medical school, and then when I get there I often spend a few minutes sitting quietly in my office with the door closed before starting my next activity. It helps me feel like I’m not being pulled in a dozen different directions at once, and improves the overall sense of coherence I feel about my day.
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