Getting Naked

When I began teaching at the tender age of 23, just five years older than my freshman writing students, my teaching was indeed naked--the first day that I walked into a classroom, attempting to project confidence in spite of my shaking hands and quaking voice, I felt stripped to the bone. I had to hold onto the podium for dear life with my shaky, sweaty palms threatening to jettison me out of orbit at any moment. Sure, I had my ice breakers ready to go, the sonorous reading of the syllabus planned, and the prompt for the writing sample ("What are five things you want me to know about you as a student? Discuss") in hand. Yet I was absolutely terrified that I wouldn't know enough to convince my students that I was indeed justified in representing myself as a a teacher, since I was still a student myself.  Now, twenty years later, perhaps 200 classes later, I still feel like a student. And while that sometimes still frightens me, I have learned how to sit a little more with the fear.  I will not know everything about a text I teach for the first time, nor be an expert on a course that I prepare for the first time.  For that matter, I will not know everything about texts I have taught a hundred times--quite often, in fact, I reread the texts I teach, and glean novel insights upon those re-readings. In teaching my students, I try to be as "naked" as possible in the sense that I am upfront about ideas that perplex me and what I may still wonder about the text.  In sitting with the fear that my students might find out that I don't know everything, I embrace that wonder, and the more I practice the better I get.

In my history of the English language course, my students and I use the OED and study word etymologies.  This is a source of constant surprise, and indeed wonder, as we connect root words to the branches of various languages that multiply and magnify meaning in a marvelous way.  Indeed, the word "wonder" in its verb form, was an Old English word: "wundrian."  Endemic to our language, it becomes a metaphor for what the experience of teaching offers: to admire, to magnify, to be struck with astonishment, to marvel.  When it is working, many teachers would say that these are some of the best moments: when we are struck, astonished, provoked to admiration, or overcome by a sense of the marvelous. More of that, please!