Sunday night, 7:30 PM. I've spent half of the day reading essays I assigned to my honors students over the summer, fixing lesson plans to fit into all of the second-week-of-school changes in the schedule that we never find out until the last minute (so much for the month of precise, day-by-day lesson plans I carefully crafted over the summer for all three of my preps...), and doing that terrible thing I do to myself way too often: overcompensating for my insecurities.
I have read, re-read, and re-re read all of the novels and plays I teach. I spend a great deal of time reading secondary literature ABOUT the literature I teach. I am a grammar nerd who actually enjoys reading about language studies. But somehow I am always worried that I am going to blank out in class,a colleague will challenge (again) what or how I teach, or a student is going to know something I don't -- a handful of times I have had a kid try to correct me about something that I manage to legitimately talk my way out of, but then I feel that that shadow of doubt (not the healthy "question everything" doubt, but rather the unhealthy "is this adult who is supposed to guide me completely unprepared to do so?" doubt) has been cast over the entire class.
As a broad example, I frequently point out to my students that language is an ever-evolving animal that is not set in stone; that descriptive grammar is as academically sound to study as is prescriptive grammar. However, the other teachers in my small department unanimously agree that they should have ONE set of grammar rules that is ALWAYS followed meticulously. I prefer to extend to my students a series of theories about proper English and explain to them that as long as they understand the importance of audience and purpose it is fine for them to switch in and out of different voices and styles throughout their writing ventures. I just feel that it (s) gives them a much more dynamic understanding and command of grammar, and (b) facilitates much more sophisticated and versatile writing STYLES amongst my students.
The majority of my kids catch onto this and thrive in my classes, but there is always a handful of skeptics who think I am being wishy-washy for telling them that it's ok, for instance, if they choose to use a Harvard comma sometimes and not other times, as long as they are consistent throughout a single piece of writing... and that there are times when -gasp- it's perfectly fine to end a sentence with a preposition (so long as it is not an extraneous one).
There you have it: the mush inside my brain. I hope that someday I will be able to just brush off the glowering looks of a few specific colleagues as I pass them in the hall, and ignore the you're-nuts-lady looks I get from that select group of students who fancy themselves superior grammarians for having memorized my department's approved list of grammar rules in their previous English classes. But for now my years of study and expertise are being trumped my the little voice in me that needs to vent about STILL not always being taken seriously, six years into this gig.
