New Semester

I'm experiencing my right-before-the-beginning-of-every-semester chaos. I'm rapidly assembling syllabi, assigning texts I have yet to read from a set of very new, and mostly unread, textbooks.

I am tense, feel on the edge of panic, and as Rob so succinctly puts it, "You're a lot of fun to be around."

I'm also experiencing my semesterly (is that a word? It should be)personal freak-out time, when I question my ability to teach, to motivate, to inspire, and to make a difference--I wonder if I can pull this off again for another semester, and then I wonder if I've ever pulled it off. And then I wonder why I'm doing this at all, when I'm really a fraud in teacher's clothing, and some day I'll be found out, and then I'll go down in history as the college teacher who was almost successful, except that she wasn't because she really didn't know what she was doing.

If this sounds bizarre, I have it on good record that it's a teacher thing. Doubts seem to be a rite of passage for me at every beginning of every semester.

But I always eventually come back to this place: I'm not the most creative or the most intelligent professor in my department by a long-shot; I'm behind the technology curve;I'm less involved in extra-curricular academic pursuits than most others.

But I became a teacher, and I've stayed one, because I loved my teachers and I think that there is value in standing with the next generation, talking and thinking and writing about what is important and what makes us human. I teach for the moment of epiphany, when a student, who has previously seemed outrageously bored, shoots up his hand and says, in essence, "I get that!" And I could go on . . .

Class begins on Monday; pray for all the students and teachers in all the classrooms whose lives will be joined for this season. Pray that this time will be meaningful and rich, and that our lives will be joined in a chorus of praise to our Master Teacher, who always gets it right!

Amen!