“IT hadn’t gone very well”

A remark my young colleague made some years  ago
walking-off, talking off a class that “hadn’t gone very well.”

Dealing with it.

Gut grind, guilt grimace & resolve to do better next time
try harder to better batter butter-up damnit who doesn’t
know that sinking feeling rolling in by after noon: internal
 smog, cats pause: a class gone bad, gone wild, gone, gone,

gone  & reassembling in my image-I-nation to re-wind,
re-play, re-enact, re-present, re- configure, re-cast, re-
frame, re-format,  re-formulate, re-form so as to get it
right and  right what would make a class go well?

 

Going Well— so that when I walked a way I would think:
well, that went well. & could stay asleep that night & not
have to be doing all that imaginative re-presentation &
mind-movie work..

             The Elements of Going Well

“I lost the investment I had once had in making  sure

students knew what I knew and what I thought,  and

eventually passed into an existential territory where all

the moorings come loose.  …I discovered that school was

 not some benign and more or less permanent feature of

 the way life is organized, but the enemy of what I wanted

 to learn and teach.”      (Jane Tompkins: A Life in School)

 

I have a colleague who confesses: “I’m scared before every

class.”  I had a colleague who would throw up in Gladfelter

Men’s Room before opening staff fall meeting—summer-days

bulimia: purging the glut of  No Classes—going well or not

so well makes no never mind from May to Mid-August. I had

a colleague tell  me I’d try more different stuff if I weren’t

worried about teacher & course evaluations, damnit—are

you kidding?

They got to Go Well.

I used to twiddle a large paper clip like Captain Queeg
balls, put stuff up on the board I could power point to
draw attention off ME: look, this and this and this:
write it down; it’s important because I say so and can
ask it on the final exam if I want to, any questions?

If I do all the talking and can fill the timespace for an
hour and 20 minutes, filter the whelm, shape the chaos,
dictate and determine the rules of my game, get thru
this particular class, get thru the week, get thru the
semester,  get thru a life-time of faking authority and
control, that’s what counts.  That I Go Well.  See: here’s
what I said we’d do, and we did it!  Any questions? Just
like the work program. Task force. Hard balls & mallets
croquet. Wicket wisdom: go thru it  one way, return the
other. Send the opposition rock & rolling across the lawn
and sock-it to the post,back where I started from.

The temptation is to read (rather than to write) to get
better, to study.All these years of schooling taught me
that: books is where it’s at. Even now a colleague is
sorting through  cast-off books & publications of a
departing faculty member: dumpster diving for
what might be  some good stuff.