Teachers Suffer Back-to-School, Too
That old grinding in the pit of my stomach is here again. I awaken in the dead of night with three weeks of vacation to go, more than my non-teaching friends get, and my heart is pounding with anxiety. As I write, it is mid-August and the pre-school jitters are here on schedule.
I’ve heard that in the army they don’t tell troops they’re going into battle until the last possible moment. There’s no mercy in knowing ahead of time. Knowing too far ahead demoralizes even the best troops.
I have been off too long, and I feel I could never have enough vacation. I won’t be ready; I never am. It will take an act of consummate courage just to face the preliminaries, the first staff meeting the week before. Then there will be an agonizing weekend of wondering what the class will be like? Will the troublesome types of last semester be back again? Will a certain administrator throw me a curve on the first day, seemingly just to give me a hard time? Will the audio-visual equipment be there for me when I need it this year, this semester, this month, this week?
I go through a little of this every week. Sunday night is torture. No matter how prepared I am, I don’t feel prepared. Or else I think of some crucial way in which I am unprepared, even though I’ve spent hours preparing in other ways. Teaching is always a performance. You can never be too ready to face an audience that always seems captive, restive, eager to escape.
Nobody seems to feel it as much as I do. When I first started teaching I felt this way all day Sunday. Now, with 17 years of experience, it creeps up on me before dinner, gnaws at me all through “Murder, She Wrote,” and finally paralyzes me with unfixed, floating anxiety that will last all night unless I can fix my fear on some concrete matter still unattended to.
The month of August is like one long, surrealistic Sunday night. It’s like 31 Sunday nights in a row. July was only a stay of execution, to be revoked at the last minute. Can August really be called a vacation month when its only consolation is to be distracted from the inevitable?
How does a football player feel before entering a game? How does an astronaut feel before lift-off? All the years of remote preparation, all the hours of immediate preparation, all the experience of actually doing the job, and I am worried about how this year will go, how it will be different, how all the things that didn’t go wrong before might possibly happen all at once.
How many hours of committee time will I have this year, and on which committees? Who will I have to face in meetings? Going to those meetings will really dig into my course preparation time, my research time, my getaway and get-sane-again time.
Now it’s white-knuckle time. There’s a fear that I won’t do my best, even though I have confidence that my best is very good. Are these the jitters every good actor feels before the curtain goes up? If we could only start in the middle somewhere, without the bailing-out feeling, without wondering if the chute will open.
A coward dies a thousand times . . . or, The things I fear most may never happen . . . . I tell myself little consoling untruths, purposely delude myself, hoping I’ll stay deluded and forget I’m doing it on purpose.
Almost all teachers are shy people. Shy people need more courage than other people. Shy teachers may need the most. They’re too smart. They foresee too many difficulties. They tend to rely too much on themselves and not trust others enough to come through for them. They’re a bit messianic; they get into jobs in which (they think) everything depends on them, and they don’t have enough interaction in performing their tasks.
Introverts make good researchers, good graduate students. What makes an introvert makes a nervous performer. And being introverted makes us need masks behind which to perform, behind which to keep the shyness, the awkwardness, the fear of being found out, when what is being hidden is something gloriously beautiful.
What is being hidden behind various false faces is a real face that believes in truth, beauty, goodness, as realities to be awakened in every human being. There is something worthwhile to be learned, and one’s faculties must be sharpened to learn it from life. There is a very naive streak in all real teachers, a streak that makes them simple, persistent and wise, as well as (sometimes) stubborn, arrogant and demanding. The streak is a belief that excellence is possible, and it will not be had unless it is demanded.
It will also not be had unless the teacher produces it. That brings us back to the long Augusts and storm-tossed Sunday nights. This season always makes teachers (at least those who feel as I do) wish that they could go back and thank every teacher they ever had. They’re carrying something forward. Lantern, torch, pigskin--the metaphors vary but the burden is pretty much the same. There might be some objective way of measuring burdens in different professions, but to anyone worthy of the title Teacher, there’s a very personal piece of baggage that will never be put aside.
Waves of nausea, after all, are a private sign of commitment, not cowardice.
