Teaching on the South Side: Finally Feeling a Little in Control

For the first few weeks of school, I was feeling pretty overwhelmed. There was one day when I actually came home and started looking for a new job. The students had been exceedingly difficult to manage that day, and I wasn’t feeling particularly cut out to be a teacher. There were so few openings for someone with a degree in English, however, that looking only made me more depressed.

I’m not sure what got me out of my funk and back on track, but I managed to scrape together a lesson plan and finish out the week. Maybe it was knowing there was only one day more in the week I had to work through, and then I could relax on the weekend that did it. Maybe it was talking to my dad, himself a 32-year veteran of public schools, that gave me some perspective. Whatever it was, I stopped looking for another job and kept plugging away at this one.

Then, this week, I started my students on their first writing assignment, and I got my world back again. I’ve been teaching writing since I started my master’s degree in 1996—this was old hat. I could teach the writing process in my sleep. Talking about pre-writing and drafting and revision and editing and freewriting and mind-mapping felt as cozy and comfortable as those really ugly sweatpants I ought to throw away, but I can’t help but keep wearing around the house. The instructor side of my brain could run on auto-pilot, which allowed the manager part of my brain to be more active in dealing with the usual student problems: constant interruptions for off-topic questions like “do you have kids?” or “how old are you?”; students who just can’t stay seated; students who want to sing for the whole class; students who need paper and/or a pen, and who wait until I’m right in the middle of my lesson to ask me for some. The list of these petty annoyances goes on and on, and when I’m teaching something I’ve never taught before, like the vocabulary words for Wanda Coleman’s “Eyes and Teeth” or Spiro Athanas’ “A Bag of Oranges,” it’s easy to slip, to lose track of my train of thought, to get progressively more annoyed at my students.

But when I’m teaching writing, I feel so much more in control. Oliver’s Law says that experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it, and while that cynical assessment might often be true, I’m finding that my almost eight years of experience (eight years? Has it really been that long?) teaching writing is paying off exactly when I need it to.

And so, tonight, as it nears 11 p.m. Central Daylight Time—far past my preferred bedtime on a school night—I finish up my lesson plan on revision for tomorrow and am reminded how much I enjoy stringing words and sentences and paragraphs together, and I find I have to scratch this itch I’ve had since I first read The Hobbit, this itch to write, and to have people read it.

Thanks for indulging me.