Smile

I’d like to give my students informal, periodic opportunities to evaluate my teaching, if I can just get over my fear of their responses. It’s discouraging to realize that students like a teacher who is willing/able to show some level of emotion in class. I’m certainly not an exciting lecturer. Part of this is because I’m nervous, but part of it is also due to my personality, I think. And how am I supposed to change my personality? It’s not that I dispute the importance of a teacher’s visible engagement with the material and concern for the students…it’s that I think it’s hard for me to demonstrate my affections so openly. Perhaps giving students the chance to fill out evaluations of my class would be an obvious way to tell them, “Look, guys, I DO care.”

When I got my senior photo taken for highschool (Mom made me do it), I remember the photographer kept telling me, “smile with your eyes, not your mouth!” He wanted me to show some emotion while looking into the camera, but not the obvious (cliché) signs of emotion. So maybe I can convince my students that I AM a real human, not a robot, by just allowing myself to look happy, just a little. One can be happy and professional at the same time, of course.

In re: overattachment: I find I can’t write well unless I’m totally invested in the project. (In other words, overattached.) If I have to write a paper I don’t really care about, I can tell I’m noncommittal by the first word of my intro. And I can’t even BEGIN to write a poem unless I’m thinking, “hey, I’m onto something here…” But maybe it would be helpful for me to allow mistakes and half-prepared lectures in my teaching, in a way that I couldn’t accept in my writing. I think “half-prepared” isn’t the same as “under-prepared.”