I'm not new to Mississippi, and home is only three hours away, but life in Oxford is very distant from life in Jackson. Jackson holds my heart, but Oxford is a welcomed change of pace. It's easy to feel the creative landscape of Faulkner and the rich cultural heritage of the state. I love how it's one of the few places in Mississippi where you can realistically walk to many of the places you want to go and that many of these places are local businesses. I love the way the University flows into the community, and it's interesting to observe the relationship they share. A year after graduating from college, I like being in a college town. Before I got to campus last Saturday night, one of the dominant feelings I had was the excitement of getting to know Oxford as more than a stopping-over place.
The first week in the Teacher Corps has been different from other categorically similar new beginnings in my life. I've loved getting to know my fellow first year teachers and the second years, and meeting these people has been an altogether different experience than meeting my peers at the start of college. We're a small, tight-knit group (I know, I know, I went to a college with little over 1,000 students, so it's definitely on the small side itself). There's so much support and collaboration, and it's free of petty conflict and social pressure--we all just seem to get along. We're a very diverse group, but we're unified in our central purpose to start a new life as a teacher. We all have guts, and we all must be adventurous to a certain degree to commit to starting a life in a new place, a life that will most certainly challenge and change us. On the first day Ben Guest encouraged us to get to know each other and to not be apprehensive to strike up conversations with each other, commenting, "There aren't a lot of assholes who do this kind of thing."
One of my favorite moments of solidarity happened when Dr. Monroe was placing us in classrooms for the summer. There are so many first year middle school English teachers that some of us had to spill over into teaching high school English classes at summer school. I had been placed in 9th/10th grade English with fellow middle school English teacher Matthew Gioia, but one of us was going to have to move to 11th/12th English. Moving to English 11/12 meant we would be that much further away from the age group we'll be teaching for the next two years. Dr. Monroe asked if she should decide or if we wanted to decide who would move. I made the comment that we'll be teaching English at the same school next year, and she asked, "Oh, so do you two want to stay together and both move to 11/12?" Before I could respond, Matthew, who is very calm and fairly soft-spoken, firmly declared, "We want to stay together." Matthew and I had only spoken to each other a couple times at this point, but it was clear that we already felt bound together on parallel journeys. My class already feels a bit like a family to me.
Joining the excitement of a new place and new people is the wad of emotions about teaching--nervousness, eagerness, anticipation, confusion. It's starting to sink in that I'll be teaching in a classroom in three days. For the past few months the Mississippi Teacher Corps has loomed ahead as some nebulous collection of small triumphs and daily failures that would happen some time in the distance. I could picture myself at the end of the two years as a confident teacher who had managed to gain control of her classroom, to light up a few young minds in the world of literature, and to make empowering, lasting connections with kids who have had such different life experiences than I have. I could imagine how rewarding the two years would be at the end and how accomplished I would feel. I could even imagine the friendships I would make with my fellow Teacher Corps teachers. But the day-in and day-out life of being a teacher--planning a lesson with a set and closure, enforcing classroom rules, and finding a way day after day to simultaneously manage and excite students so I could actually teach them something? I had no idea.
All week we've heard about how trying these two years will be and how we'll think about quitting many times. From Ben: "If you're crying yourself to sleep every night then you need to go home but if you're only crying yourself to sleep three nights out of the week, then keep going." I fear he was only slightly kidding. We've heard repeatedly that we're the type of people who are used to succeeding at everything we try but that this will be very different and that we're inevitably going to fail time and time again, especially at the beginning. Surprisingly enough, it was comforting to hear this. It was reassuring to know that the program doesn't expect us to go out there and shine from the start. It's nice to know that if we try and fail, we're not a disappointment. I realized yesterday, however, that I've spent most of my time here imagining the different ways things could go wrong in my classroom. I've imagined myself utterly failing on delivering my first lesson--being stilted and blatantly unnatural and unconvincing in enforcing classroom rules. It's important that I've envisioned less than desirable classroom scenarios because I'll find myself in the middle of them many times. I knew it would be hard, and it's invaluable to hear about the trials the second years and their predecessors have encountered, but I need to start imagining myself succeed. I need to imagine myself as that confident, inspiring teacher that I thought I could be when I applied. If I keep replaying scenarios of failed lessons and management in my mind, then I won't have the confidence and composure I need to channel when I step in the classroom.
My fiancé, Lloyd, described me one time as "steel wrapped in cotton." I consider myself a strong person at the core but essentially gentle, sensitive, friendly, and not outwardly tough. After talking to current and former teachers about the importance of being strict and unrelenting in class at the start of the year, I worried that I didn't have what it takes to command authority. I know I can do it, though. Sometimes I'll just have to be more like cotton wrapped in steel.
What a grand adventure these two years will be.
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