Authority and Other Delusions
“You are more prepared than you realize,” our leader of the two-week teacher training section tells us over Zoom. Her connection lags on my computer so I hear: “Yooooou arrrrrrrrreeeeee” in slow-motion, and then “morepreparedthanyourealize,” at a quick, high-pitch. I do not feel prepared. I don’t want to be a teacher but being a teacher means my graduate tuition is free. We close out the training by sharing what we are most looking forward to in the semester to come. A colleague writes in the chat: ‘Encouraging mindfulness in the classroom.’ Another: ‘Christmas.’
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When I was nineteen, I was hired to be a ropes course instructor for a residential summer camp on the Chesapeake Bay. No experience, no problem, said my interviewer, the 22-year-old HR manager for the camp. They put us in hard hats and taught us to tie knots, timed how fast we could make a double-loop bowline. My hands blistered and cracked and became hard. Our safety checks occurred through song. “Belayer ready?” I sang. “Belay on!” The kids sang back.
“I have to tell you something,” my best camp friend said to me at staff karaoke night, midway through the summer. “I’ve been wearing the harness backwards.”
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Graduate school has led me to a town where S and I can afford to buy a house, so we do. The house needs improvements, which means money that we have already spent on the down payment, which means we go to Home Depot and read a lot of Wikihow. “I think that’s right,” we say to each other quite often. “Yes, I think that looks right.” A nail for a painting pokes through to the other side of the wall. A borrowed van nearly tips over when we don’t account for the unbalanced weight of the wood going 40 around a bend. A neighbor informs us they suspect we have a vine growing into the house—sure enough, we find it curling up a bookshelf in the basement. S sprays it and it withers. “I think that’s right,” I say.
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When I was six, my grandmother told me that she knew a dance to control the rain. Under her direction, I found a long stick and enough pinecones to form a circle on the grass. I stood in the circle and shouted: “WA! WA! WA! WAAAAAAA! WA! WA! WA! WAAAAAAA!”
It did, in fact, begin to rain shortly after. My grandmother went home, and it kept raining. It rained for three days. On the third day, I called her on the landline. I explained with great distress that the song had been too powerful, that it would never stop raining. “Don’t worry,” she said. “There’s a simple song to stop the rain.”
I went back outside with the stick, the pinecones. In the circle, the new song: “AW! AW! AW! AWWWWWW! AW! AW! AW! AWWWWWW!”
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My students call me Professor. They raise their hands. They send me formal emails about tardiness and absences and essay questions and their grades. I’ve tricked you! I’ve tricked you all! I’m actually just a student myself! I was trained for two weeks and made this syllabus up last week! I reply with equally formal emails, sign off: Contact with questions, EM.
S and I have joined the neighborhood HOA. We weigh in on the height of grass and no-harm beehive removal and participate in tag sales. I call seven different people to discover how to pay property taxes. The final woman, the right one, offers me some life advice: “Don’t worry hon, just keep asking questions and people will help you out.”
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For my undergraduate work-study in Dublin, I was assigned to the Crime Victims Helpline. The training consisted of a handout titled ‘How to Avoid Taking the Job Home.’ Alongside another freshman, I read crime reports and filed them based on their genre of trauma.
When another student was almost kidnapped by her cabbie, I thought about how I would sort her. When I was grabbed by a man twice my age in a club, I thought about how I would sort myself. On sunny days, we were sent to update the literature at Garda stations. “How old are you?” one officer asked us. “Eighteen,” we said. “Right-o,” he said back.
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S and I rent out a spare room to an Irish PhD student who used to live in the building next to my Dublin school. I teach her how to drive on the American side of the road. The turns need the most reminding. She teaches me how to shave her head. We take the ears the slowest. She goes home when her grandmother passes, texts me that her mother asked her to write and deliver the eulogy. On Wikihow, the recommended first step for writing a eulogy is to “Define the tone.”
“I think that’s right,” she texts back.
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We begin class by talking. My teaching mentor calls this “a roundtable check-in,” but I call it winding down the clock. My students complain about their other classes, their roommates. They worry over exams, summer internships. I ask them what they want to do after school. They have very practical answers: engineer, lawyer, marketing. I ask if any of them want to be writers. “I want to make money,” they say. “I make table scraps and I bought a house,” I say. “You’re a teacher, not a writer,” they say. “Ouch,” I say back.
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About six months into my first post-college job, I was asked to train a new hire to our team. On his first day, I showed him how to make loose leaf tea. I showed him where the stockroom with the free ramen was. I told him to bring Tupperware, keep space in his backpack, that if you stuck around long enough on Fridays you could take the milk home. “I don’t think this is what you’re supposed to teach me,” he said. I showed him a room where you could take a nap and no one would come looking for you. I showed him my favorite lunch spot and we stayed there for over an hour. “Doesn’t anyone care if we’re gone this long?” he asked. I told him that I asked myself that question every day.
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In our weekly teaching practicum we discuss how to be the best teachers we can be. We compete to see who can say the word ‘pedagogy’ the most. I never win. “The important thing to remember,” our teaching mentor says, “is not to take our students’ behavior personally. As teachers, we just have to show up, do our jobs, and the students’ success is theirs to decide.”
I ask: “What if you don’t want to be a teacher?” The question is taken as rhetorical.
At the monthly HOA meeting, S and I are asked if we want to run for Board seats. We express that we don’t have any experience or particular know-how, and furthermore, haven’t yet lived in the neighborhood for a full year. “It’s more about enthusiasm than expertise,” we are told.
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Over the holidays, my parents ask how teaching is going. I say that I just wish I knew if what I was doing was right. But what’s right? By what definition of ‘right’ are we judging what happens in class? There’s no oversight. No one approves what I’m doing. Are the students learning anything? How much have their parents paid for a person at most five years older than their child to prepare them for the world? Are they learning what they’re supposed to learn in an introductory course vaguely titled College Writing? What sets apart College Writing from regular Writing? I should teach a course in killing vines that grow into your house, I say. I don’t know anything about writing.
“I’m sure your students love you,” my mother says. “You’re probably so real to them.” This furthers my questions—at what point do you stop being ‘real’ and start being competent?
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When the weather warms up, I take my students outside. Instead of writing essays and thinking about Unit 3: Circulating the Conversation, we play Field Day. I buy bandanas and face paint.
How fast they can leap-frog? Very fast. Can they eat an Oreo off their foreheads with no hands? Nine can’t, one can. Two boys make 30 yards before the egg they toss breaks between them. I tell them to spin ten times and then run as fast as they can. A girl who never talks in class spins like an ice dancer, sprints faster than any of us could believe. We cheer for her and she laughs.
“Are we allowed to do this?” they ask. I offer them some life advice: “Never ask that question.”
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A tree falls down in our neighborhood and destroys a small bridge that spans a tiny creek. It is a rather spectacular event—the bridge is pulp. We all stand around it with our hands on our hips. Hm, we say. Well. Would you look at that! Does anyone know how to build a bridge? No one seems very handy. One man built our free little library, but that came with a set. We agree this is a bigger project. S volunteers the name of the contractor we used to fix up the basement. The neighbors are pleased by this plan. We agree to call in the morning and discuss the quote as a group. Good, we say. Great. Well! Glad we have that sorted out.
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“Did you always want to be a teacher?” my students ask me. No, I think. I don’t want to be a teacher even now, in the midst of teaching. “Yes,” I tell them. “I love teaching.” They seem to believe me. And when I ask them to open their books, they do.