Wayne Booth -- A Teacher's Journal Part 1

What scares me about teaching?

1. Complacency -- I've taught some courses that are driven by certification exams. I teach the exams, I teach the exams well. The students pass, every term. But these are by no means the sort of good, thoughtful courses that I want to be teaching (and that's the precise reason that I'm here, back in school, pursuing a higher degree instead of adjuncting forever).

2. Not being "young" anymore -- Parts of my pedagogy and persona in the classroom rely upon being approximately the same age as my students--give or take about 5 years. When that overlap no longer exists I will either have adapted or be screwed--and I'm trying to begin this process with each new term. I can't very well teach the rhetoric of 80s/early 90s cartoons and commercials to people who weren't alive then, can I?

3. Getting back into "serious" composition -- I've taught business writing and tech writing for a bit now, how can I get back into teaching straight composition? And will everyone be able to tell I'm one of "those" people?

4. That what I've "learned" about teaching doesn't actually make me a better teacher -- When I started out, everybody got relatively good grades (hey, getting called before the dean during christmas break for giving a C taught me my lesson at that school quickly). And yet, I can't even truly say that I was inflating grades. I was developing thoughtful projects that students tended to excel on that included plenty of chances for students to use outside literacies (and therein I avoided the concept of inflation by giving plenty of chances at success...)

And students LIKED me for that, or maybe they liked their good grades....

I no longer fear students disliking me, and I no longer fear giving bad grades. But I don't know that that makes me a better teacher--it just makes me better psychologically equipped to deal with it.

I will probably write another response to this article later.... that deals with some more specifics, rather than what gives me the willies at 3am....

...but one thing in the article that DID bother me was his negative reaction to a student writer who had written a paper that "missed its mark" in criticizing an author.

What could this student have learned from his response, other than not to try to write something difficult?