I was meeting with a new student the other day. After I'd worked with him for 10 minutes on his first major college essay, he said to me, "How long have you been teaching?"
A nervy question, but at the college where I teach writing skills to young artists-in-training, I had heard it before. So I politely smiled and answered with a vague, "A few years."
When he prefaced his next statement with, "No offense, but ...," I prepared myself for a remark that would undoubtedly make me scream later. But what he said didn't make me mad, just anxious: "I'm used to having a teacher with a more authoritative stance, that's all -- but I don't mean that in a bad way."
I realize that, at 24, I am quite young to be teaching students, some of whom are just a few years younger than I. Academe is one of the few fields where the charm of a youthful smile and figure are nothing but a curse. Students equate wrinkles on your brow with experience, knowledge, and degrees. In a college classroom, it seems, the only thing that is supposed to appear fresh is your method.
That makes it hard for young instructors like me -- the type who took the quickest route to an academic career, straight from a bachelor's degree to a master's of fine arts, without taking the time to pull over and age a few years along the way. It wouldn't matter if I conducted my classes with the fervor, or lack thereof, of an 85-year-old man; when students walk in the first week, I'm still asked, "Are you the teacher?" And facial hair wouldn't help my credibility in any way as it does for young male instructors.
Just because I look young -- OK, am young -- doesn't mean my skills are not as refined as the next girl's, I mean, woman's. I've studied for years to develop my mind to a point where I am capable of teaching others what I love to do: write. To then be questioned about my experience just seems like a rare form of reverse age discrimination placed upon me by a judgmental client. A client who isn't afraid to remind me, or my dean, how much he's paying for my services.
In the lecture halls dominated by people in khakis and button-downs, I may as well be wearing leather pants and a sequined bra. Or at least that's the paranoia I face each day when I go to my closet. Can I wear that skirt, or is it too short for those impressionable minds? Do my red cowboy boots say trendy or trampy? Does that old wool sweater of my father's make me look scholarly or like a twentysomething pothead?
I've had students comment on my "style" in end-of-term evaluations; I have a "hot" chili pepper in the competitive online professorial ratings; and as a young woman with a recent undergraduate past, I am well-versed in the language of the college boy. When I walk into my classroom, I know what they see. I may be pretty, but I'm not stupid.
It's a shame that all too often in our society, control is coupled with age and callousness, but in teaching, that seems especially unfortunate. As an amateur, I can't help but feel self-conscious about my lack of long-term experience. So, having someone else, even a student, point it out is not the best "teacher moment" I've ever had.
In fact, most of the worst teacher moments I've had so far involve having to exert my "authority." Like the time I had to lecture my students on professionalism -- the whole school-is-your-job routine; I'm your teacher, not your best friend; do the work on time, and don't show up late. Or the first time I made a student stay after class to discuss his behavior -- the eye rolling, the comments under his breath, the distracting jokes he made to other students. After I gave him my speech and he left the classroom silently, I knew that I had been heard.
In those moments, I knew I had authority but I felt drained, as if I had just argued with a roommate. For me, authority has always been one of those traits that is difficult to show, until a student questions it.
When I'm being honest with myself, I admit that I've daydreamed about walking into a classroom of students and seeing that look of fearful admiration in their eyes. I had a teacher like that in the first college writing class I ever took; a seasoned, full professor dressed in three layers of leather: vest, blazer, and overcoat.
He only scared me a little, but he intimidated me a lot. And though I learned writing techniques in that class that I still use today, at the time, his lectures on myth, his towering stance, and his love of leather were all a mystery to me.
That's one of the reasons why I enjoy the connections I make with my students. I feel that I can relate to them in a way that makes the classroom open, not scary.
What makes my youth work for me is not that I let the students walk all over me, but that, at 24, I am not yet jaded by a life I haven't led. I'm not as set in my ways as a tenured professor might be. If a new assignment isn't working for everyone, we discuss it as a class and we fix it. If our Monday-morning section meets just hours after the Super Bowl ended, well, sure, we can discuss the commercials, as long as students can relate them back to the consumer-culture handout we read a few weeks ago. If I can illustrate the difference between public and private language by leading an entire class using my students' own slang (and knowing what it means), I've gotten their attention and I've gained their respect.
There's a difference between acting young, and being perceived as young at heart. I know there will come a time when my students will stop calling me by my first name and start calling me "Professor"; when we will no longer watch the same television shows, shop in the same stores, and appreciate the same random pop-culture references; when reality will surpass knowledge, and I will realize that it doesn't matter how much more I know than my students -- they won't learn unless they want to.
But right now, the important thing is not that I recognize the pressures of campus life, but that I remember what it was like, because it wasn't that long ago. I can see myself in the student who shows up to office hours every time an assignment is due; in the student who becomes visibly upset every time she receives another average grade; in the student who laughs at my jokes because she wants to do well, not because I'm that funny.
It takes more than a graduate degree and a teaching job to forget the fall semester of 2001 when, no matter how hard I tried, I just could not get an A in my Shakespeare class. Not that I'm bitter or anything, but the professor couldn't have been a day over 25.
