So I have now had each of my grad school classes once, and am reminded how much I like being a student. I believe this comes in a large part out of deep fear that I'll never be able to really be successful at anything else. But tell me some stuff to read and probe me on my understanding of it, and I'm set. I can do that. I can write papers and even, to some extent, participate in group discussions. And then I get to feel productive, even smart, even in some sense superior to people who aren't as good at this. And let's not kid ourselves -- who doesn't like feeling a bit superior? And it's validated, at least in the circles I run in: being in school, taking classes, doing well in them, those things are valued and heralded as achievements. So people tell me I've accomplished something and then I feel happy. Easy. I've been doing this for over eighteen years.
Being a student involves primarily a relationship with the teacher, in which they assign tasks and judge my successful completion of them. Sure there's a lot of jargon about student-centered learning and community-based learning and intrinsic motivation and whatever, but in the end, that's what a class is. The teacher has the power, and if I can do what she asks in a way that pleases her, I get to feel good about myself. I might have fleeting responsibility toward other students -- to collaborate on discussion questions, or prepare my part of a powerpoint, or something -- but it's never anything very difficult and in the end it's still about pleasing the teacher. This is what I am used to. It's so comfortable. I don't have power over anyone else; I don't hold anyone else's fate in my hands. Nothing is riding on my success except my pride.
This is why teaching terrifies me, even though I can't seem to break away from claiming that it's what I want to do. Then
I have the power, and the responsibility, and no one will necessarily tell me if I'm doing a good job or a lousy job. I'm the one who's supposed to know what I'm doing, not the one submitting my abilities for evaluation. I feel nauseous thinking about being in charge of a class.
Meanwhile, two out of my four classes give me the fluttery, breathless, claustrophobic feeling that I had while doing reading for my thesis -- the feeling that what we are trying to learn is
too interesting,
too important,
too endlessly vast, and I want to inhale it all in at once but know that I can't. The first is "sociolinguistics and education," in which we will study all the things I wished I were studying at college in addition to all the syntactic trees: bilingual cultures, creation of identity through language, gender and language, dialectical differences and how they affect impressions of the speaker, power structures in discourse.....wow. Overwhelming. When talking about that kind of thing I feel suffocated because it feels so close, tantalizingly close, to touching on something deeply fundamental, primitive, central to what makes human life what it is....but never really quite gets there. There's always confusion and too much jargon and ironically, I'm not sure it's possible to use language to express these truths, although they are truths
about language. This class I will love because of its daunting vastness and importance. On the other hand, the other class I am excited for is conversation analysis, and here the feeling is different. I am thrilled for this class because it will be gritty, hands on, because by concentrating on the details we will really be able to
say something, something real and true about how people use language -- even if it's limited in scope to something like "here is a data analysis of how people use the word "okay" to indicate closing of a conversation." Maybe we're not threatening to touch any fundamental underpinnings of the universe, but we're deepening understanding in another dimension, inward, toward the details. And that is thrilling too, and in many ways gives much more of a sense of accomplishment. The professor said that many people are turned off of conversation analysis precisely because it is so technical and gritty -- because, for example, of the elaborate transcription system that you have to learn to use and interpret before being able to say anything -- but I think the grittiness is exciting.
Of my other two classes I have slightly less to say. Pedagogical English Grammar will not teach me anything new, but that's okay, I won't complain about one easy class. Classroom practices will likely be the hardest class, not necessarily in workload or effort put into it, but psychologically: I predict it will be the class I feel the least natural aptitude for. Hopefully it will be really good for me, though. Hopefully we'll really get into the nuts and bolts of managing a class in a way that I never have before. I definitely need that. Perhaps it will make me feel slightly, just slightly, more qualified to hold the power of being a teacher.
These lyrics aren't entirely relevant, but they are beautiful.
Deep red are the sunsets in mystical places;
Black are the nights on summerday sands.
We'll find the speck of truth in each riddle,
Hold the first grain of love in our hands...
