Last Tuesday was the first day of classes on my campus for the 2024-25 academic year. It kicked off my thirty-eighth consecutive year standing in front of the classroom—thirty in my current position at Providence College, three at Christian Brothers University, and four as a graduate student teacher in my master’s and doctoral programs.
You would think that after that many years in the classroom I would have gotten over first-day-of-class nerves a long time ago. But no. On Monday night, as has been the case on each of the nights before the first day of class for seventy-four straight semesters (minus a few sabbatical semesters), I had a tough time getting to sleep and woke up every hour with the new semester on my mind. I finally rolled out of bed around 5:30 all the time thinking and fretting about the 50-minute lecture on Immanuel Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” that I would be giving to eighty-five sophomores and two colleagues in my team-taught, interdisciplinary course five hours later that morning.
Just before every fall and spring semester, teachers across the country are putting the final touches on lesson plans and syllabi, getting ready for the onslaught of the next round of students in just a few days. In my wildest dreams I hope that the students greet the syllabus with an expectant excitement that matches the enthusiasm with which I constructed it. Perhaps the most enjoyable part of teaching is the planning, because at that stage things are still pregnant with great possibilities. Every fall and spring teachers are convinced that this semester the seats in their classes will be filled with the most motivated and brilliant students ever and that this semester each class will be a serious contender for the gold medal in pedagogical fabulousness.
But then, of course, the students show up and reality kicks in. Some days are truly exhilarating and the medal possibilities are still in play. Some days are a study in mediocrity. Some days feel like slogging through quicksand. And some days, no more than five minutes into a fifty or seventy-five minute class, a little voice in your head says “IT ISN’T WORKING.” You try to ignore it, pretend you didn’t hear it, but there it is again–“IT ISN’T WORKING.” The students know it; you know it—now what?
Every teacher occasionally (frequently) has recurring dreams of this happening or of standing in front of a class with no pants on—the nightmares are equally disturbing. My own sleeplessness the night before each semester begins is at least partially because of nagging fears that this semester’s first IT ISN’T WORKING experience might be on the first day of class. That has not happened to me yet, but no matter how experienced the teacher is, that experience is guaranteed to happen sooner than later.
We’ve all been there. I’ve had new teachers come to me after a bad class and say, in essence, that “if this is what teaching is really like, I’m going to quit.” Fill in the blanks from your own experience. If I had known that married life was going to be like this, I never would have gotten married. If I had known that children would be such a pain in the ass, I would have remained childless. And for me, perhaps the biggest one—if I had known that following Jesus and living the life of faith was going to be like this, I wouldn’t have bothered. Saint Teresa of Avila was having one of those moments when she wrote “Lord, it’s not surprising that you have so few friends when you treat the ones that you have so poorly.” So we all know what we are tempted to say and do—and often do say and do—when it isn’t working. Are there any better strategies?
One option is to recognize that there is an alternative model to my “me-centered” framework. Maybe reality and the cosmic scheme of things are not perfectly patterned and adjusted to my preferences and what I think I need. Maybe there’s more going on than I imagine. Maybe, just maybe, I’m not the center of the universe and maybe, just maybe, God has not fallen off of the divine throne just because things aren’t working out the way I want them to.
Fear of failure is closely joined to fear that I am not in control. Once I realized many years ago that in the classroom, just as in every other aspect of life, I am not in control I began to develop a few strategies to deal with IT’S NOT WORKING moments. Humor helps, particularly if it is turned on myself. Honesty is useful: sharing with the class your perception that things aren’t going well often inspires the students to do what they can to get things back on track. A short memory is also helpful. Simply saying to myself “well that sucked!’ or “that was embarrassing!” as I leave the classroom then forgetting about it is a strategy that it took me years to fine tune.
You’ll be happy to know that my Tuesday morning lecture on Kant’s “What is Enlightenment” went very well. But that won’t help the next time around as I anticipate a new semester. And bottom line, that’s a good thing. One of the times I woke up on Monday night I said to myself “When the time comes that you can’t give a fifty minute lecture on Kant to a bunch of sophomores without screwing it up, it will be time to retire.”
That didn’t help. Because the truth is rather that when the time comes that I’m not on edge at the beginning of the semester, when I’m convinced that I can simply mail it in without some nerves being involved, that will be the time for me to retire. Teaching is both a tremendous privilege and a tremendous responsibility—I should be on edge and a bit nervous every time I have the opportunity to once again create the world anew in the classroom. It is up to me to assemble certain texts and ideas that have stimulated and changed me as a teacher and as a human being over the past many years, then to tell a “show and tell” story that will, if successful, draw and entice my students into the world of collective learning where we will encounter, as Marilynne Robinson describes it, “the human mind at its mystifying work, endlessly, sometimes brilliantly, fitting myth and reason to reality, testing them against reality, just for the pleasure of it.” As the saying goes, it’s nice work if you can get it.
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