20140113.0602

Today begins the Spring 2014 term at my current institution, and I will be teaching nine hours consisting of three sections across two classes: two sections of first-year composition and one of early British literature.  It is the easiest teaching load I have had since my assistantship--I was teaching seventeen hours in four sections as an adjunct--and the first time since then that I have gotten to teach in my area of specialty.  (I am qualified to teach composition through years of doing it, and I am qualified to teach American literature through years of study, but my focus was on early British literature, and such classes are not common at my previous institution.)  For both the relatively light load and the distribution of it, I am grateful.

Even so, as always, I am a bit apprehensive about going back into the classroom.  Every time I am faced with new sets of students, I am a bit nervous as I try to look ahead.  How will the students react to me?  Will I face what I faced last semester?  Will I respond to it the same way if I do?  Will I be able to reach more than a hare handful of them?  (The old calls of "If you reach only one, you have done enough" ring in my ears, and they are wrong; it is not enough until all are called.  But I have said that my teaching is my ministry, I think, even if I cannot find where.)  Will this be the set of classes that goes too far and finds me out of work or worse?  Will this be the semester I get shot in the face for handing back a paper that bears a failing grade?

At the same time, I wonder if this will be the term that goes well, the one in which students impress me with their work across the board and scholars, as yet untrained but with clear potential and desire to learn, and we can move together beyond the basic content into beginning to grapple with deeper issues.  I wonder if this will be the term that sees many students see the relevance of what they are doing in my classes, not only for their curricular requirements, but for their own enrichment and the betterment of the world in which they live.  I wonder if this will be the term in which my teaching work and my work on The Work will finally coincide.  (It might be; I have some projects to do that seem similar to those I am asking of my students.  The model will likely be helpful, even if I am not going to put it in the usual place for reasons that will make sense later on.)

I wonder about many things.  I have many questions.  I hope to be able to instill the same things in my students and to not lose them in myself.  And I know that this semester potentially offers opportunity to do so.