The Reason Why

The best part of coming back, it turns out, is the teaching.

I taught last semester, too, but it was a bit strange. I was a co-instructor for Practicum 2 (when undergraduate math ed students go out and observe in the schools before their student teaching) with another graduate student who had taught the course several times already, and while I absolutely loved working with my students I always felt just a little out of the instructional loop. This semester I am teaching Practicum 1, and I am doing it all by myself. And even though my academic background in education tells me that team teaching is a good thing, and that one of the major problems of teaching is independence and isolation and lack of collaboration and feeling overly protective about one’s instructional territory, I am the same as most any other teacher in that I went into teaching partly because the independence appealed to me. I like doing my own thing, and I like making decisions with an eye to how those decisions will help the students rather than how those decisions might be met with approval or otherwise by the other expert in the room. I don’t mind working with other people, but I want to have my own sphere of influence within the sphere of collaboration.

So it was kind of nice to stand up in front of my class last night and be the teacher again. Every time I stand in front of a class I remember why I like teaching. Part of it is social gratification. Parties and other get-togethers often make me feel socially incompetent, but when I get up in front of a classroom I suddenly develop the remarkable ability to hold people’s attention and to earn laughs and respect and it’s a great feeling.

None of this comes naturally to me. I don’t consider myself a great public speaker, at least not extraneously. I’m not confident in front of unfamiliar crowds, or even familiar ones. I’m not a natural center of attention, I’m not good with names (either remembering them or using them), and I’m certainly not funny. And that’s why, even after four years’ worth of teaching experience, I still stood in front of the classroom in mild surprise last night—surprise that my new students actually laughed when I said something funny, surprise that I was able to remember all but one of the sixteen names (and that I was able to rescue myself brilliantly from my one mistake by turning it into a Humorous Situation), surprise that my class already seemed to like me and I’d hardly spent fifteen minutes with them. But then, I already know that I do just fine in front of the classroom, every semester. A very good friend once attended one of my math classes just to see me teach and when we came away she said, in amazement, “wow, you’re so…social in there. It’s like you’re a different person.” The funny thing is, I don’t feel like a different person when I get into teaching mode. Well, part of me does, but part of me thinks, “This is who I really am—why in the world can’t I show this to other people?”

But teaching is only partly about me. What I really love about teaching, and I can’t count how many times I’ve said this, is the students. I love figuring out what I can do to help them and I love actually doing it, or trying. And I just enjoy being with them. I’m occasionally intimidated by my students until I actually get into the classroom. I was intimidated by high schoolers until I actually taught high school and discovered that high schoolers are really a lot of fun when you’re not one of them. Then, when I came back to college, I was initially intimidated by my Math 110 students. After all, many of them were my age and some of them were older than me. But it turned out that it didn’t make any difference. They were every bit as fun to work with as the high school students, and maybe even more so since more of them wanted to be there (and those who didn’t just didn’t come). And this past semester I was a little worried about helping out in the practicum because these were real college students, not BYU college students—these were the kind who wore swore and drank on the weekends and wore honor code inappropriate apparel and…well, were basically much more mature versions of my high school students, but this didn’t really occur to me and I shouldn’t have been surprised that I loved working with them more than anything else I did (academically) last semester.

I think it’s hard not to love the people you teach. I think you probably shouldn’t teach if you don’t. And it’s a difficult feeling to explain to someone who hasn’t been there in some way. The same friend who came to watch me teach once talked about how it always bothered her when people would stand up in sacrament meeting and say, “I don’t even know all of you that well, but I love you. All of you.”

“You can’t love someone without really knowing them,” my friend protested, and then several months later after she had served in our ward’s Relief Society presidency she recanted.

“I’ve never experienced this before,” she told me, “but it’s true. I don’t know everyone as well as I’d like, but I love them. All of them.”

And that’s sort of how it is with my students. I really don’t know them all that well. I will know them better by the end of the semester, but even then I will have only seen a very small part of who they are. But I already love them and I’m thrilled that I will be able to work with them this semester.

And really, that’s why I’m here. I think that was my turning point last semester. The moment I realized that going through this program will allow me to continue to work with students like this, I was finally able to accept that what I am doing here is worthwhile and right. And that’s a good feeling to have.