A Confession

I suspect that what I am about to write is nothing my colleagues around the world have not felt, and I hope my students this summer (or those who know of this blog, anyway) will forgive me for, well, either what I will say here or possibly the truh of it.

This session has not been my best. Don't get me wrong, I believe that my students walk out of my classes far better writers than when they walk in. It's just that I feel as if I was, in some way, ineffective. OK, perhaps ineffective is the wrong word. I was less effective than usual.

I got addicted (yes, I use that term) to teaching in 1989. It was in that year that I first experienced the rush associated with realizing that someone had understood and internalized what I was explaining. I was a community college student and a tutor in the writing lab at Bellevue Community College at the time. Let me explain:

A student was having trouble with a general punctuation test. He had done well with all of the individual tests (commas, semicolons, etc.), but he couldn't put it all together. I used an explanation I have since learned was one that other had pioneered, though I had never had any exposure to: I explained punctuation as traffic signs. The student understood and scored well over basic mastery levels on the next exam, simply with that.

It wasn't that he got 90-something percent on his test that got me. I expected that, despite his five earlier sub-80 performances. It was that I had seen what I chose at the time to call (andlater learned many others called) "the lightbulb moment." When I gave my traffic sign analogy, something changed. To this day, I could not tell anyone what told me he understood, but I knew it. I knew that he understood and would pass. Something—quite probably it was a mixture of signals too subtle for me to express—told me that he understood. I was hooked. I had moved from reciting information a student could get from a handbook to teaching information in a way that was best for that one person.

Only a month or two later my decision to teach was cemented. A student who had written about her experiences growing up in Cambodia under Pol Pot's Khemer Rouge regime rushed up to me near the theatre building and gushed her thanks. She had received a 3.7 (A-) on her paper,and somehow she attributed that to me. Her paper had been stunning from the first sentence, and my assistance was marginal at best. Still, she was standing there, beaming with pride, and crediting me for her success. I suppose she may have received only a 3.3 without someone's help, but there was something to that. Someone appreciated what I had done. More, someone had appreciated something I was able to do (and could get paid to do). She vanished before I could even tell her that I had done, essentially, nothing and that she had written a compelling personal experience paper. How could I not want to dedicate my life to such an endeavor?

But this summer I feel as if I missed something. True, most of my students are doing acceptably well, and some are even doing better than I initially thought was possible. There are tragedies, to be sure, but there are always tragedies, and such matters are really more relative than absolute (is a B performance from an A student a tragedy?). I just feel as if we spent more time on Y than X. Maybe I feel this way because I have traditionally spent more time on X than Y. Maybe, though, X is more important. Maybe this is how the class should have gone, and everything else was just years of getting me here.

I wish I knew how this all fit together. Other instructors tell me that I do my job well, based on what my former students say and how they perform. Even my students will tell me I do my job well. I guess I just wish I had done it better than it feels I did this summer.