Catch-Up, and Prayers to Be Useful

Hi friends,

It has been a while since the last post! I am sorry. I have spent a lot of time planning, and grading, and trying to get into a new rhythm. Let me catch you up on a few things:

I am finally at the point where I actually feel tired – for the first few weeks, I was running on such high energy that I didn’t notice how late I was staying up, or how much class took out of me. Last week I hit the exhaustion wall. And today, in rainy Grand Rapids, I felt even more exhausted. It’s the weather. It’s the fifth week of school. I’m feeling it.

And my students are feeling it, too – I have a class that meets at 7:45 in the morning, and while they studiously do everything I tell them to do, I know that they live behind a film of sleep-filled apathy. I know it. I can see it in their eyes. My other two classes are talkative and engaged, and they have their own challenges, but it’s the early ones that I feel sorry for. They get the first draft of my lesson plans, which means that they get the brunt of when the plans don’t work; they get my own weary, blurry-sounding instructions, my rushes to class because the bus was slow, my lame morning jokes. Also, none of them watch the Office. I tried to reference Jim and Pam the other day, and they just stared at me.  And all my culturally-relevant jokes go out the window….

The hardest thing, and the thing that makes me feel the most unsure of myself, is the actual work of lesson planning – I often feel like I am floating above my plans, unable to really say what I’m looking for, or what I’m trying to do – it also doesn’t help that I’m making up a curriculum for this class as I go, simply because it’s impossible to have a set schedule of things/expectations when I don’t know what those are, even though I spent hours making a syllabus. Even though I have a clear idea of the major assignments and goals of the course, it’s hard to know how to get there; what steps do I take to give my students the ability to write a real thesis? One that reflects real thought, and attention, and understanding?

So I flounder a bit. And I flounder because I want the steps to be intentional, because I want my students to know exactly what they are thinking and how they got there, because I am more about process than lecture. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve lectured a lot in the past few weeks, almost every day, and it has been challenging and rewarding. Working an overhead projector is not my strong point. But lecturing has been helpful in terms of making me more specific – it’s easy to just tell someone that their writing is sloppy, but it’s more important to show them why; to give them a common language in class and in their understanding of the writing process; to name what it is they do so that they have ownership of their writing, responsibility for it and to it. I’d rather sound confused and correct myself than give them a bunch of terms that don’t work and that don’t have value in their disciplines, in their lives.

We’ve spent the past few weeks reading through the Writer’s Almanac, which has been the biggest joy. I’ve had so many students, especially my male, football-playing, number-crunching-accountant students, tell me that they’ve finally gotten a poem because of one that they’ve read in the Writer’s Almanac; I’ve had students with reading disabilities catch the lines of a Martin Espada poem (“White Birches,” a lovely tear-jerker of a poem) in a way that my more advanced students could not, in a way that caught the essence of the poem’s images with complexity and depth; I’ve had students write essays about fishing and factories and escapes from Bosnian warcamps that have knocked me on my ass. I guess that means I’m doing something right if I can be surprised by the students’ work.

And I hope it means something that I’ve surprised them, too, that I’ve caught their attention in a way that is more than fleeting. I flounder. I am not there yet. But I am surprised at the angles I am taking – that, in my focus on the practicalities of writing for their majors, that I have told them things like “Literature is beautiful; literature is about the search for beauty amidst the tragic; literature helps us further define the tragic and the beautiful in our own ordinary lives.” I’m surprised by that because, while I believe those things with all my heart, I did not set out to say them. I did not mean to be that kind of English teacher, the one who wears purple sweaters and makes bad jokes and reads James Wright to her students in the hopes that their ears would hang on the beautiful parts, that they would be open to beauty, that I would be the one to open it to them. I’ve done all those things. It is a surprise to me still.

The narrator of Gilead, who, at the end of the novel, speaks these words to his son: “I’ll pray that you grow up a brave man in a brave country. I will pray that you find a way to be useful.”

I’m sure that I will flounder some more – tomorrow, the Dean of Arts and Sciences is coming in to observe my class, to see what I’m doing right and what I need to work on. She is a nice woman, and I’m sure that it will be fine. I hope the floundering is minimal, that I’ll be brave and that the useful way is found.

Of all the things to surprise me today. Of all the things that could have thrown me off, or made me unsure, or caught me completely off-guard.

Happiness.

Relief.

Knowing what I was doing.

Walking in a pair of heels without falling.

Having my first student visit during office hours, with a student who just wanted to chat.

And having a student write “Professor Backous” on a writing prompt.

I am so used to being exhausted by work. I am so used to working ten-twelve hour days (both from CLC and Perspectives), being completely exhausted, then staying up late into the night to work on writing. I am so used to running on thin reserves. It makes sense to me to calculate what I can do by what I have time for, to schedule social time into small blocks, to ignore my friends or my need for sleep in order to keep going. It feels familiar, and expected, for me to consider each task of a day as a breath held, sucked in, waiting for release. I’ve spent the past two years just running.

And then there was today: a class where I was running the schedule. Time to not only finish work, but to envision new work, to make plans without the fear of running out of time. I know that it will get busy, and I know that I will not always feel this comfortable or at ease, but there was something comfortable about being at GRCC, some sort of expectation that things would be good. The sun shone. People bustled by me on Fulton. I found the Schuler’s bookstore downtown and graded papers. I went home.

This is good.

It is good because I actually feel energized by my work, which might be just a first day thing, but I have the feeling that this is more than a good first day; it feels like the work itself, the work of teaching and planning and getting things together, is what gives me this sense of confidence. I was nervous, but not in a way that I didn’t know how to handle, not in a way that threw me. I finally felt present in a classroom, which means a lot. It’s what I wanted. It’s what my students need.

Now: to plan for Wednesday. Teaching writing is hard! It makes no sense to just throw a bunch of writing exercises together. It makes no sense to say “just free write.” I had my students take a multiple intelligence quiz this morning, and so many of them are the kind of learners who need to move around, who have a hard time just listening to someone talk. Who don’t like to write. This is what I expected, and it’s what I need to prepare for – how do I make writing accessible to people who are most likely not going to pick up writing in the future in the way that I have? For the kid who’s going to be a cop? I told them this morning that my goal was to make the humanities present in their daily lives, to make reading and writing not only useful, but pleasurable, even if they didn’t actively pursue them as singular activities. I talked about Garrison Keillor, whose anthology “Good Poems” I’m using in class for writing imitations and general poetry goodness. What makes Keillor good, besides being himself, is his love for poetry and writing as parts of ordinary life; you hear good writing, and good storytelling, in the best ways by being in the places where good storytelling really happens: over the sink, in the bedroom, at a loved one’s front door. I want my students to get the imprints of good words because good writing becomes instinctual, because language is the most present when we meet it simply, without hyperbole, without pretense. We are the most present to our own lives when we do this. And if we can’t read this way, or write this way, how are we to live?

After class, one of my students, an older gentleman who has spent his life working in automotive factories, came up to me. He had a silver beard and a paisley shirt. He smiled at me. “I listen to Garrison Keillor,” he said. “I get the Writer’s Almanac.”

This is going to be good.

Before It All Starts

So I’ve spent the past few days in a fog of clarity. That makes no sense, but it’s the only way to describe how I’m feeling – I don’t know what to expect with the classes that I start teaching on Monday, but I’m not scared, or anxious, or even a little nervous. I feel confident. I don’t know if that means that I’m in the right place, or if that means that I’m getting ready for a real wake-up call. But I have the feeling that, regardless of how my classes go, that confidence will remain, and that it’s a gift, something imparted. 

I visited GRCC for the first time this, and just fell in love with the campus; it’s at the heart of downtown Grand Rapids, and I have to take two busses to get there from my apartment. It’s an established institution, surrounded by old churches and sculptures and little bars, and there is a bustle and flow that just makes me happy. It’s not as anonymous as Chicago’s bustle and flow, but there’s an energy to it that comes from the city, an actual pulse, a busyness that I love. The place feels useful, not fanciful or overdone; people come to GRCC for practicality in their education, because they need actual courses to get an actual degree, to take care of their lives. Usefulness is important to me, and I think that I will learn to be useful here, to get involved in how people think on a daily level, how they process, how they write. 

And the syllabus is done. And I met with the English department on Thursday and realized that I am more prepared than I thought I was, both in terms of coursework and in terms of my mind: what scares me the most is not the actual class, or the prep, but the students, whom I’m envisioning will directly challenge me, or hate me, or at worst, make fun of me. Teaching at Perspectives gave me a lot of experience in being made fun of, and I learned to deal with that, but if I have someone ask me, with a snicker, if I’m pregnant, or a virgin, or call me names in different languages, I don’t know what I’ll do. It’s funny to me that this is my primary fear in teaching, the management of a class; because I look young, I feel like I have to overcompensate. My Perspectives students used to laugh at me when I gave out detentions. “You just look too nice, Ms. Backous,” they would say, and I would hang my head in the teacher’s lounge and just want to cry. I don’t want my authority to come out of fear, AT ALL, but I also want to be respected. Maybe I should just hang my degree around my neck.

It’s funny that I’m not more nervous than I think I should be – maybe I’m finally old enough to just be ready to do something. Maybe the anxiety I felt in teaching before came out of being young, out of being fresh and intimidated and completely overwhelmed. Maybe I’ll be overwhelmed by different things: the loads of work, the hours, the schedule. Maybe my students will just look sleepy and turn in their assignments. Maybe it won’t be so scary after all. I hope.

Syllabus Making, and What I’m Actually Doing

Hi friends,

 

Hurray! I’m a blogger! In a good company of people!

 

I figured that I should explain what I’m actually doing, and in so doing, give a brief history of the teaching life, as I’ve lived it. I think it’s common for most jobs to have a sort of niche, a way of being that encompasses them; there ain’t no life like the teaching life, or the daycare life, or the I-stand-at-a-register-and-scan life. As I live and make friends with the seminarians of Calvin Seminary, I know that their way of life, as they become ministers in various ways, is especially a way of being, the whole process of seminary life a kind of immersion, or a kind of boot camp. Whatever image you prefer. 

Teaching is the same. But in my head, teaching has always had this elevated status, this almost-ethereal kind of life, where you drink lots of coffee and have passionate conversations and stand on desks in communal epiphany at Yeats, or number theory. That’s what draws so many people to teaching, the chance to make a difference, to be remembered as the person that helped you open a book, change your life. It’s what drew me into it in high school, where I struggled immensely to reconcile my love of reading and writing with my new Christianity, which I thought would prompt me into an obedient life of ministry in some youth group somewhere, clapping my hands and listening to testimonies. “I can be a teacher,” I thought, “and through my example, share the Gospel with people.” 

I have yet to grapple with all the things that have made me so anxious about teaching, my fervent high school conversion being one of them. I think that the best way to sort it out is to not try to do it all at once, but let that narrative tell itself: I have struggled my whole life with my fear that I am not useful. That the things I’m good at are not useful. This came from my church in high school, I think, but it came from my family too, this overriding wave of guilt when I couldn’t stop an argument, or a trip to the bar, or a fist. And at the same time, I’ve struggled intensely with the idea of calling, and have never fully known how to discern the voice of the Holy Spirit: what do you do when someone tells you that you have a gift? How do you know that you’re not burying talents? For a long time, I felt like I was living in a trajectory of other people’s words and actions, never knowing how to say what I wanted to do because I was afraid that I was wrong, that all my choices would always be wrong. I longed for someone to prophesy over me, for someone to just babble over my head and tell me where I was going to live, how many children I would have. What I was supposed to do with my life. 

Luckily, I had good teachers.

Here’s the short end of it: I decided in high school that I wanted to be a high school English teacher. Went to Trinity Christian College, loved English, hated my Education courses. Picked up Philosophy instead. Decided to be a professor. Assumed that things would be easy, then nearly had a nervous breakdown at a friend’s dissertation defense because the whole ordeal scared me so badly, and because I thought I had to get my Ph.D. Decided to get my MFA. Helped lead a writing course that I assumed would be easy, which instead turned out to kick my ass. Graduated and got a job teaching writing and reading at a charter high school in Chicago. Also kicked my ass. Took a break from teaching and finished the MFA, working at a daycare to pay bills/have more time to write. The writing got way better. The sense of self emerged. Wondered if teaching was really it for me, but then was offered two positions teaching writing and humanities at two different colleges in Grand Rapids. Given the current economy, and given the economy of West Michigan, I took this as a sign. I said yes. Now I’m going to be a professor at Grand Rapids Community College, and possibly on-campus at the University of Phoenix. 

So that’s where I’m at. I spent all day envisioning syllabi, and had not only joy in it, but directness. I felt useful, but not burdened. Excited. Focused. I haven’t known that feeling in teaching before. Maybe I’ve finally grown up. Or maybe I’m just out of boot camp.

Professor Woman?

So my friends are the first to know that I like labels. Titles. Roles. When I entered my undergrad, I literally introduced myself to people with this saying: “Hi, I’m Allison, and I’m going to be a high school English teacher.” Granted, most of my conversations my freshman year of college involved telling people what major I was choosing that week, but it was a pretty dorky thing to do, regardless. I suppose that it fed some sense of self, gave me some way to present myself to the world, told me what was what. 

 

I think that most people experience this – we want to tell people who we are, and for the most part, that’s summed up in what we do, or want to do. We identify ourselves by our usefulness, by skill and supposed skill. At least, that’s how it worked in the church I went to in high school, where kids in the youth group were defined as “gifted” by what they could do well, their abilities to speak or watch children or skateboard being verifiable talents used in the Lord’s service. It was an attempt to know yourself, to belong and remain distinct. It was an attempt to discern vocation.

 

I’m not the biggest fan of blogs; as an essayist and a memoirist, blogs are a bane of the literary nonfiction world, giving every single person a chance to tell their story with (oftentimes) little art and craft and immediate responses. But I want to be discerning, and I want to live out my vocation in a way that rings true, in a way that truly makes me useful, that truly makes me myself. I’ve spent a few years trying to figure out what teaching means to me, how to live into the gifts and weaknesses I have when it comes to teaching, to being a teacher. And I’ve come to realize that discernment, as it trickles and flows, is not always an instinctual gut response, some inner voice telling you “yes” or “no” when it comes to making decisions, or choices, or following desires. It’s taken me a long time to recognize the difference between a discerning voice (guided by the Spirit) and a puffed-up voice, one that sounds congratulatory, or condemning, echoing in my head as I turn over options and try to figure out my life. And that voice has come the most out of the mouths of others, out of you, my friends.

 

So I invite you to this blog, not because I am a “blogger,” but because I want to keep you updated on this, my re-entry to the teaching life. I’ll write more later. I hope you’ll accept my invitation. And I hope that I get some direction for the syllabi that I’m beginning work on this week, because September 1 is not too far away, and I am going to be a professor, after all.