Thursday, July 29, 2004

why it is so difficult to be me

It's far easier to teach a course when you know nothing about it. It's far easier when someone else can tell you what they think you should do, and you can't argue with their reasoning because you have no beliefs about it. It's far easier to not know...

I hated my first semester teaching. I knew what I was doing was a huge disservice to my students, but I had no information on what else to do. Now I know what I need to do to grow as a teacher, but I am not allowed...

It's awful when someone promises you freedom, tells you how to achieve freedom, and then quickly limits your freedom in ways they don't see as limiting, but threaten to undermine everything you believe in. It'd be far better if they told me I had no freedom from the beginning instead of taunting me with the promise of it...

I'm probably being cryptic. Let me just say that writing a Rhetoric syllabus and teaching this course next semester seems to be one of the hardest things I've ever done in my entire life. And I've done some awfully hard things before...

I've had to resolve myself to turn this next semester over to the universe, hope I don't screw it up too much, know it's going to suck, and trust I'll learn something valuable from all this, if nothing else, how detrimental the mandates of certain people can be to my own sanity and the education of my students. STANDARDIZE STANDARDIZE STANDARDIZE! You'd think we might have learned that doesn't actually work... You'd think the years of Writing Studies theory and the professors here might have been able to teach us that. Unfortunately not. The good news is, this only has to last the length of one semester.