professor goldfish

One thing about teaching that I had forgotten--a short memory serves you well.

Sometimes you walk into the classroom and have an amazing day planned, one that literally brims with insightful, thought-provoking discussion questions and a couple of short, important lecture notes and then tops it all off with some valuable in-class writing time. This day, which you've sketched out carefully on a piece of light blue legal paper, looks wonderful.

And then the class actually begins. And then the hour passes and your students file out, having not really done much in the way of interacting besides some grudging group work and dutiful note-taking, and you're left standing there, erasing the board slowly and wondering if deep down they think you are just the biggest douchebag ever.

I tend to obsess over things. A strange offhand comment from a grocery clerk at a store I'm shopping at only because I was on the north side of town and probably never will again rattles around my brain for days. I'm still wincing from an embarrassing incident that went down this summer that involved my family and a little too much red wine and a rather inappropriate, for that audience, Charades clue.*

But thankfully, thankfully, my brain rarely turns over less-than-successful classes in my head. After those classes--every class, pretty much--I'm a goldfish with a five-second memory. I erase the board, I head back to my office, I get in the car, and I drive home. At home I take the dog for a walk. I make dinner. I watch four back-to-back episodes of Law and Order, and then I fall asleep. And when I wake up, it's a new day, with new classes to prep for, and Professor Goldfish steps back into the classroom with a new piece of light blue paper. What a small miracle it is, this ability to treat each class as a fresh start. Fail, then fail better, then fail even better. Give me that, and maybe a little plastic castle for my bowl, and it's why I love this job. I really do.


*it may have involved the term fart machine