Vulnerability in the Classroom

 As I read through the beginning chapters of Richard H. Haswell and Min Zhan Lu's collection titled Comp Tales: An Introduction to College Composition Through Its Stories, I am struck over and over by one theme: vulnerability. Everyone in the classroom--the teacher and the students--is taking a risk showing up and letting their voice be heard. Much of the reading in the beginning chapters of the book focuses on new teachers, adjunct teachers, college freshman comp courses; there is a lot of stumbling toward authenticity and understanding. Much of this truly resonated with me, as I am stumbling myself: I don't know how to stop thinking like a student and think like a teacher.

Maybe I am afraid, at the bottom of it all.  Maybe it is because anything that I desire that is worth risk has the potential to really break me if I find out its not my area of talent. Maybe it is because I want to be a good student so badly that I don't know how to take the risk of being a good teacher, because I have always thought that the best quality in a student is knowing that you don't know anything. I am still working through the "maybes," so it really helps me to read stories of teachers like Patrice Hollrah, who shared her experience and then said, "...you have to believe in yourself" (23). I have learned to believe in myself as a learner. I sincerely believe that I can learn anything that I am driven to learn by interest, passion, or necessity. But, I am struggling to transition that into believing in my self as a future teacher. I think there is a possibility that buried within my belief that humility is a good quality is this false belief that humility means never letting yourself feel so confident that you can make a mistake IN FRONT OF PEOPLE and be ok with it. 

Another maybe is this: maybe working though my own struggles with authenticity and redefining humility will help me in the classroom. Many of the stories I have read so far in Comp Tales highlights the discomfort students feel in the classroom, especially in composition courses. Composition is this almost ethereal thing. It is like the black hole of academia: stuff is born there, it is really cool, we name it stuff, but at the bottom of it, we don't really understand it much. I am reading other texts that seek to bring comp studies into the known and explained world, and that is good. If I want students to know what we are doing, I need a firm grasp of it myself. But, I think composition can be hard for students because, well, we end up composing ourselves on the page. What we think, who we are, what experiences we have, and what our background is can all end up showing in or between the lines of our writing. And that feels scary sometimes. I think this point is my best takeaway from the early Comp Tales regarding how to help students feel more comfortable: "Students don't arrive in our classrooms unformed and uninformed: we need to discover their existing framework of knowledge, and perhaps we must do so before they can appreciate our own" (41). Students know things, and I know things, and we get to compare our known and add to our known. 

I think what has my wheels really turning is that when I read these tales, I want to be part of this conversation. I want to be a teacher with good stories and bad stories. I want to have a Comp Tale that I want to share at parties and in speeches, and I want to have a tale that makes me submit it as "anonymous." I want all of the scary, vulnerable safety of being right where you are supposed to be. So, I have to figure out how to make the shift: hanging onto my forever-student mindset while grasping a little out of my reach to the becoming-teacher. I have to work through my maybes and my fears, and anything that makes me do that is worthy work toward a more authentic person showing up in a classroom.