back 2 school

Last week, I started my sixteenth semester of teaching college-level writing.

I think typing out that sentence actually made me have a small heart attack.  

Sometimes I feel like I'm still a brand new teacher. Part of that is because I have always been learning as I go: I taught my first class in the first year of my Master's program, which I entered straight into from my undergrad degree. There was no "real world experience" that prepared me for teaching that class. We got a week-long orientation before teaching, and then that first semester we got a Composition Pedagogy course. It was truly out of the frying pan and into the fire. Since then, I got one more pedagogy class in my Doctoral program. I didn't have the comprehensive pedagogy education that K-12 teachers have, so there's always an element of feeling like there's SO much I don't know about teaching. 

I think the bigger reason why I still feel like a newbie is the fact that the context for teaching seems to change faster than ever now. By the second year of my Doctoral program, I was feeling pretty confident about my teaching, mostly because I had taught this particular class enough times to have a routine for it. Naturally, the year I finally felt confident was the year that Covid completely changed the landscape for teaching. So, we pivoted, I got used to a new teaching context, and the world kept spinning for the most part. It's when we came back to in-person teaching that things started to feel like they changed on a yearly basis. What worked before Covid lockdown certainly doesn't work after Covid lockdown. Beyond that, what worked in the Fall of 2022 very decidedly did NOT work in the Fall of 2024. 

So, again, we pivot. And we continue to pivot, sometimes mid-semester. As we close out week two, I can already see the ways things will adapt in this iteration of the class. I learn something new about teaching from my students every single semester, and I look forward to seeing what this batch of 92 have in store for me. 

Feel free to remind me of the optimism in this post when it's late October and I am frazzled beyond belief. :)