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Between the 10th and the 21st were all either ENG 554 class periods designed to get me up to speed to teach Composition 101 starting this week or, at the very tail end in particular, social functions designed to familiarize me with the department (many of which I already knew and have been on good terms with, happily). It was completely exhausting, since I'd do the bit at Edwardsville from morning to afternoon, drive home, and pursue the additional reading and other assorted mechanical work that goes into the logistics of just having a class (much less actually teaching it).
I started teaching and taking classes again just this last Monday the 24th. My first two periods in front of students wasn't really as difficult for me as it's been for some of my peers. I can't say exactly why, but I think the fact that I've spent a pretty reasonably sized cross section of my life being a person with social anxiety working in service industries has kind of inuered me to this set of nerves. I've been yelled at by a pretty wide spread of archtypes of the American general public, and the only thing that's kind of strange about my current situation is that I'm seen as an authority figure that's respected as the default rather than a neutral, faceless facilitator party at best. My biggest current anxiety stems from, as far as I can tell, not living up to the needs of the students I'm working with. I've been able to communicate the fundimentals of literary theory regarding Derrida, Foucault, and Barthe to high schoolers and warehouse workers, though, so my biggest concern is whether I can actually communicate methods of writing composition. It's difficult to tell how rough this will be on me until I recieve the results back from my first assignment, so we'll see.
There is kind of an unintentional positive side effect of the entire situation which is that, for all the people that didn't really see 'graduate student' as quite a lot of work, the fact that I'm teaching a class as a TA pushes me back into the 'legitimate work' column even for people that don't see universities as respectible institutions or the humanities as 'useful' subjects. Whatever it's worth, it reads as a 'job' and so I'm seen as making an 'honest effort' to support myself. (The quotes, because I always was, but that's really another entry.) These days, though, I'm busy enough that it's easy to have an excuse to stay away from people I'm not interested in dealing with. In fact, it can be difficult to find time to hang out with people I do want to see, but I've really been making the effort in those cases.
I started teaching and taking classes again just this last Monday the 24th. My first two periods in front of students wasn't really as difficult for me as it's been for some of my peers. I can't say exactly why, but I think the fact that I've spent a pretty reasonably sized cross section of my life being a person with social anxiety working in service industries has kind of inuered me to this set of nerves. I've been yelled at by a pretty wide spread of archtypes of the American general public, and the only thing that's kind of strange about my current situation is that I'm seen as an authority figure that's respected as the default rather than a neutral, faceless facilitator party at best. My biggest current anxiety stems from, as far as I can tell, not living up to the needs of the students I'm working with. I've been able to communicate the fundimentals of literary theory regarding Derrida, Foucault, and Barthe to high schoolers and warehouse workers, though, so my biggest concern is whether I can actually communicate methods of writing composition. It's difficult to tell how rough this will be on me until I recieve the results back from my first assignment, so we'll see.
There is kind of an unintentional positive side effect of the entire situation which is that, for all the people that didn't really see 'graduate student' as quite a lot of work, the fact that I'm teaching a class as a TA pushes me back into the 'legitimate work' column even for people that don't see universities as respectible institutions or the humanities as 'useful' subjects. Whatever it's worth, it reads as a 'job' and so I'm seen as making an 'honest effort' to support myself. (The quotes, because I always was, but that's really another entry.) These days, though, I'm busy enough that it's easy to have an excuse to stay away from people I'm not interested in dealing with. In fact, it can be difficult to find time to hang out with people I do want to see, but I've really been making the effort in those cases.