. . . and gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche

I’m here at FSU in the doctoral program in humanities at the [advanced] age of 52 because I want to learn and I want to teach. I love them both.

Throughout my life I always dreamed of teaching some distant day, but ended up stumbling headlong into it during the 90’s, being recruited literally one day before the semester started to teach English for Non-Native Speakers when an instructor shortage hit the local community college. I was asked by a classmate in my master's program who was in charge of the ENS program at Valencia Community College. I almost said no, out of fear, but realized dimly that this was one of those moments when you either find the courage or learn to like living in the basement. In a way it was fortuitous that these were my first students, because I faced a classroom full of people who were slightly more scared than I was – and much more respectful of me as a teacher than any group of American students.

In that class I had students from all over the world, of all ages. I had a very young Chinese woman who had been here two weeks and cried about missing her parents; a Vietnamese gentleman who’d been in the U.S. for 15 years; a math doctorate from Brazil; students who were Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Polish. I had to abandon a longstanding quirk of panicking when speaking with people with thick accents or dialects for fear of not being able to understand them, and intuitively develop a self-taught crash course in Really Listening. I quickly learned how to listen with more than my ears and how to focus on more than their words. I rapidly learned how to speak much more clearly and to give feedback as part of conversation and thus correct effectively but unobtrusively. I must have done well, because they all passed the necessary standardized tests at the end of the term and progressed to the next level.

Then I graduated from my master’s program and signed up to teach a Humanities course. This time I was the only one who was uncertain and terrified, and I had to let the students go the first night after only ten minutes, because I couldn’t get my knees or voice to stop shaking. I don’t remember having to force myself to come back the following week, but I did; and by the end of the semester I felt as at home at the front of the classroom as I’d always felt in a student’s seat.

I found to my surprise that I loved teaching for many reasons, not the least because, like being a parent, it required me to be better than I am. Teaching required me to reach, and stand taller, and look beyond what I was comfortable seeing. Teaching demanded that I put on the robes and speak from a place beyond my personal prejudices and emotions. When I went to the front of the classroom I found myself standing for a little while in the stream of eternity where the nickel stuff doesn’t count, looking backward and forward in time and reassuring my students, whom I was surprised to find that I truly cared about, that beauty and truth and the good things about humanity have been part of our past and can be part of our future. That the arts are the story of our past, written with and on our hearts, and they connect us with ourselves and everyone else. As a teacher I became part of the great chain of learning and immortality, as timeless messages passed through me from past minds to new ones. It was a transcendent experience.

And then there was the time I ate a fly. The air conditioning in the portable building I was using that semester broke down so I opened windows and a door right next to me in the front of the room. I was well into an impassioned speech about something like the wonder and beauty of the Riace bronzes when a bug buzzed briefly before my eyes, and dove right down my throat. I staggered around, clung to the podium, turned several colors, and choked and spat and gagged. The students were absolutely riveted. None of them actually smiled but I could tell from the light in their eyes that I had made their day. For those moments I had their attention more fully than I had ever imagined possible. They seemed to watch me a little more closely for the rest of the semester but I never did an encore. Life sometimes seems to me to be a series of humbling experiences.

A memory that pops up: when I first taught at the community college, I was dismayed at the general lack of writing skills. (That situation hasn’t improved at all.) The students relied heavily on the (then fairly primitive) spell checker, not realizing that for it to work, (a) they had to be somewhat close to the real spelling, and (b) they had to carefully check the replacements it made. I read one paper on Gothic church architecture with many confusing references, which made me wince and instinctively cross my legs, to “the medieval catheter.” The students didn’t even seem to notice when the spell checker renamed them. After a while I caught on and if Delicious Lust turned in a paper, I knew it was probably Delinda Lusk’s work. I even got used to seeing my name as “Professor Bailed” or “Ms. Bailiff.”