The Other Side of the Desk
As my first class of the semester
was just beginning, and everyone was settling into their seats, I was
calmly ignoring a horrible truth. The clock hit 7:10, conversations died
down, students pulled out pens and paper, my mouth dried, my knees weakened,
and everyone’s eyes wandered to the front of the class where they
settled on the teacher. Twenty something eyes, all staring at me.
I’ve sat in the back row of a hundred classrooms and looked up at a hundred teachers. They seemed, to me, calm, ready, authoritative, well-mannered, and respectable. As I stood, for the very first time, as a teacher, I was none of those things, nor was I, for a period at least, breathing. I felt my jaw clench and my face redden, these people were expecting something from me, but I couldn’t seem to remember what it was.
I had played with the idea of coming scripted. I would stand in front of the class and launch into a semi-memorized, funny and informative monologue. “Welcome to my class. I will be your leader, and you are to call me Dr. Xanzibar,” I would say, and everyone would laugh. Or, if they did not laugh, my world would crumble and I would probably cry. I decided against trying for any specific emotion, and had moved into a more unscripted plan.
I remembered nothing of that plan. Being an upright ape in distress, I was genetically programmed to either attack my students, or flee. I was not prepared to take rational action and call on previous planning. However, using centuries of cultural evolution, I stood my ground, and, at length, the solution arrived. I would start the class of the same way every other class I had taken in the past three years had begun, by sharing our names, our experiences, and our expectations of the class.
I had previously thought that this was a mundane exercise to help people learn each other’s names, to help the teacher identify the needs of the students, and to let the students feel involved in the class. I know now, it’s simply putting the ball in the other court, because having the ball in my court was as comfortable as sandpaper briefs.
While everyone was introducing themselves, I decided my next step would be to ‘go over the syllabus’, which I remembered was generally the next step. The class had been created, by me and a friend of mine, to show students how to use the internet for environmental advocacy and fundraising. The first day, the syllabus said, would be devoted to actually telling students what the internet was and how it worked. Remembering now what it was I was supposed to talk about, I dove in.
My students, surprisingly quickly, came to understand that the internet is just a bunch of computers hooked together, that the web is a way of accessing information on those computers. They found out that servers are computers that contain information, and clients are computers that get information. They quickly grasped the peculiar system of locating information on the internet by linking domain names with IP addresses, and IP addresses with individual computers. The class, together, decided on a domain name. We purchased it, and leased space on a server in Texas. The students asked me questions about cookies, transfer protocols, statistics, and search engines. Hands would go up, and I’d shoot out mine and call out a name. Nine times out of ten, and much to my surprise, I said something that sounded remarkably like the answer.
At 9:30, more than two hours after the class had begun, I felt like we’d done enough. Students came up to ask me questions personally, or just to talk. I certainly wasn’t well mannered or even very prepared, and I didn’t feel calm or respectable, but I did feel like a teacher. And that, it turns out, is a very good feeling.
For a full year I wrote a weekly column for a daily paper in Boulder CO. I wrote about being young, poor and green, and the column was widely loved throughout the city. It remains one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.
If you've got some time on your hands...check 'em out.
Colder than the Hinges of Hell
Four More Ounces of Responsibility