teaching persona

Reflection 2 of Semester 2:

This is going to be short and sweet sour.  It has been one hell of a week.  I’ve almost made it entirely through.  It’s better than when it began.  Failure is a valid outcome of effort; in fact, failure proves effort.  Try more = fail more, which ultimately means fail less.  This is what I’m thinking right now.  So, on to my prompt…

“How are you developing your teaching persona? Who is emerging? How has this changed as you have changed classrooms?”

I was originally puzzled by the idea of a teaching persona.  I’m not much of one for personas in general.  I’m sort of a take-it-or-leave-it guy.  Case in point, I find that if I dress up “too professionally” for teaching (say anything more dressy than a cotton sweater or shirt with buttons) I feel so uncomfortable and unlike myself that I find it much harder to teach.  So, I thought teaching personas might be great for some but would clearly not be for me.  Not so.  I’ve recently realized that I do, in fact have a teaching persona.  It is very similar to my actual person, except that it’s more, well, adult.  Sort of an uber-me, who is always fair and sees everything that’s happening and does not hesitate to say whether something is acceptable or not, and is never sarcastic, even when being blatantly insulted.  I like it.  It is a version of myself that has a distinct gravitas.  I didn’t have it last semester.  Maybe because I hadn’t found it yet, maybe because my students were Seniors, maybe because I didn’t need it as much with such a strong CT as AC was…  But now that I’m in the land of Freshmen I am really glad to find this more serious and grounded and thick-skinned self. 

Also, I accidentally came out to my class on Wednesday.  I say accidentally because that wasn’t how I had planned to do it…  I misheard K. say “B. is gay.”  She swears up and down that she actually said “B, yay!”  I believe her, why not?  But I had said to myself that at the first pejorative use of the word gay, I would make a definitive statement about how I felt about that usage.  So, I did.  I said (and really it just kind of came-out) “I’m not okay with the use of the word gay in a pejorative or negative way in my class, in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m gay.” Then K. said, “I didn’t say gay” and she explained and I said okay, but I’m still not okay with it.  And then E. (a perpetual sarcastic comment maker) said, “that’s awkward”.  There were a bunch of titters, and I said, “Let me make myself very clear E., and everybody, I do not feel awkward about being gay.”  To which D and Ka. and Kh all shrieked and said, “oh, she told you!” or something like that.  And then we talked about it for a little bit, some of them said they had not noticed that I was gay and were surprised and we defined “pejorative” and discussed different usages of words and I felt very lucky to teach in Berkeley. 

I’m off to dream of quizzes and graphic organizers…