Excitement brings me back

November 7, 2010 at 19:14 +07:00 (burn outs, Deems's musings)

Dear Ally and Brena,

Yes, it has been a while since I’ve reflected on my teaching experiences here. The reason is perhaps that this quarter, I’m teaching a recitation class and it’s not something that’s exciting me. It’s something that deserves a post of its own: how I haven’t been able to take a recitation session, where I don’t choose the material I teach, and turn it into a great teaching/learning space. Because even though I’m much more comfortable standing in front of a classroom this year, I think being a recitation leader is exposing  my inexperience as a teacher…

but it’s also making me question (again) whether a teacher should always be excited about the material she’s teaching, or about teaching itself.

And being a recitation teacher is also exposing the inadequacy of such classes where students have to go to a lecture twice a week and meet for recitation once a week. When I meet my kids, we’re both already tired (especially this far into another hectic quarter), and we’re dealing with a heavy load of material from the past week.

And part of my inexperience as a teacher (and as a recitation teacher in specific) is that I’m unable to be very creative in my teaching methods.

Anyway, all this intro is actually to say that the one thing I’m excited about these days is a new class I’m going to be teaching next term. It’s a literature course on writings by women of color and I get to choose books by my favourite writers. It’s reminding me again how much I love building a syllabus and trying to find good material to introduce to students. At the moment, I’m searching for documentaries or movies by and about Chicana feminists, and writings by contemporary and young Chinese American feminists, as well as by US indigenous feminists.

And once this is done, the challenge for this overworked TA is to be able to teach well in tiredness. The other challenge, of course, is to be able to create a space to constructively and productively talk about racial relations and class privilege and the history of genocide and discrimination and exploitation in the u.s, and all such uneasy topics, in what I predict is going to be a middleclasswhite majority classroom.

The third challenge is to do all this while not erasing myself as someone who’s not from the u.s (or an alien with a work permit, as I fondly refer to myself sometimes). When I get overwhelmed by the thought of teaching all this material that is not part of “my history” (though I also know that none of us have been taught the things we’re teaching in highschool) and to students who I usually don’t share many cultural references with, I remind myself that it is not so much the content that is important for me to take from this experience as much as it is the methodology…

So basically I’m still dealing with the same issues we’ve been talking about all the past year.