April 11--A Nervous Day

I was very nervous about today.  I have been upset about it all week. In fact, the reason I didn't blog yesterday related to my concern about today.  Today, Friday, was the day I actually met the most challenging parts of my academic schedule at Northwestern and I was so anxious about it.  I spent all of last night reading, writing, and preparing. And being nervous.

Today I met with the two graduate classes in Religious Studies I am taking.  They are both made up entirely of doctoral students, a few in Jewish Studies, a great number in History, an English here, a Film Studies there.  Some Gender Studies are mixed in as well.  I met these classes last week but that was just the introductory session.  Today we were getting into the actual work of the courses.  I have been reading the assignments all week (many hundreds of pages.)  The books are different from what I most often read and I was having trouble getting my mind to shift into gear for more philosophical text.  I am posting some of the material in the side column of the blog but I can give you a quick flavor here.  I read Pierre Bourdieu, French anthropologist and theorist who suggests that social structures create habitus, a stable system of beliefs, values, expectations, and principles which guide and govern society.  Emile Durkheim, the father of modern ethnography writing about collective effervescence.  Essays about the nature of narrative, narrative and historiography, thick description as a methodology for interpreting culture, passages from 1st century Josephus and from the Talmud.  Then I joined an online forum where students casually threw terms around like "post-Kantian."  Finally, I prepared a presentation on Bourdieu to present to my class.

It was not that I felt overwhelmed.  I didn't.  I had scheduled the reading and writing out pretty carefully and by late last night I had worked my way through it.  I felt frightened.  Frightened because I didn't know if I understood what I was reading, and I suspected that all the other students did know exactly what they were studying.  Frightened because I knew I would be expected to participate in the seminars and I didn't know what to say.  Or I did know what I might say and I was certain it was stupid.  Frightened because I was unclear on the expectation of the professor for the presentation and I had no idea whether I was meeting the requirements or not.

I need to emphasize that this was not a little intellectual fear.  By this morning, I was convinced that my course selections had been a mistake.  I did not know how I would make it through the day.

On the train ride to Evanston, I spent some time thinking about what I was feeling.  That was when it occurred to me how often my students might feel something similar.  When the material is new and challenging, do they question their ability to learn it like I did?  Are they frightened because they think they will have to speak or write and they will not know what to say?  Are they concerned that what they might say will be heard as ignorant?  Do they make a try at an assignment but feel unsure whether it will be acceptable or not?  I am certain that many of them have a history that tells them "yes" to these questions.

I want to try and remember the anxiety that can come with a challenging class and the discomfort that accompanies new experiences of which we are unsure.

There is a happy ending here, in case you were wondering.  The classes were wonderful and I was not driven out or made the object of derision.  In fact, I enjoyed the conversation very much.  There were parts of the reading that I had not understood and the discussions helped those.  There were insights I had that added to the class.  The presentation surprised most of the class because I took an unusual path to it but it was well received.

I understand that much of this is my own insecurities.  I am far enough along in my intellectual and academic lives not to get upset about starting new courses.  I should be better adjusted.  I should be but I am not.  I do worry.  And I think some of my students worry as well.  It is all right for me.  The stakes here are not very high.  I am taking these courses for love and learning and, I I do poorly, nothing very big is lost.  But for many of my students, the stakes are higher.  They are learning to be learners.  And that is what they need teachers for.