The Podium Is Your Stage

Or maybe you’re in one of those large lecture halls where you legitimately have a stage to teach on. And your students – they’re your audience. The people that you have to please through accurate and useful teaching. One thing that Sarah Deel and I both have in common was being assigned to teach the first semester of graduate school and thinking “So um how does this work exactly?”

I remember as I prepared for my first class at 9:30am in Randolph 212 I was nervous. What if I don’t find a parking space in time and show up late? What if I have technical difficulties? I had reviewed the slides provided to me several times and still felt like at any point I would choke. Occasionally I get nervous during public speaking events but never to this extent. Never was someone’s success or failure in a course based on my ability to relay information over the course of a semester. What if I was seen as a fraud?

But nervousness was soon eradicated once I began to speak. Once I began to notice that I connected with people. Once I saw the one student that I remembered from my banner roster sitting dead center in the class nodding in assurance that she was being reached. She became my centering until I got comfortable. I continued to scan the room in order to connect to my students on that first day but found myself check back at that one student. Through her I knew I was going to be ok. And I was ok enough to survive my 11am that commenced immediately afterwards.

I’m an extroverted person – but I also have a somewhat fragile ego. So while the podium became my stage and I relished in the “spotlight” (I’m a solar Leo and lunar Scorpio so if you’re into zodiac you understand what that means), part of me was still scared of how it’d look if I messed up. But relishing in the spotlight also meant that I allowed myself to be authentically me – straight teaching no chaser. My students became comfortable with knowing that I would joke with them as much as they’d like to joke with me, but still respected me enough to not test the boundaries of my authority. Candy was a staple in my classroom because I taught mornings – managing to get to class and stay awake the entire time was a major accomplishment for most, even myself.

When I got prepared to teach for the first time I thought to myself “what if I don’t like it”. Going up and through engineering my interests and ideas for careers paths changed many times. Part of my nerves may have been attributed to the thought of “I think I like teaching but I’ve never really done it. What if I do it and hate it? What will I do next?” But as the semester continued on my students became my babies (even though they were college freshmen and most of legal age but whatever). My podium became a stage in which I got to be myself and help people in the process. I realized that I ABSOLUTELY love doing what I do and it keeps me going. And apparently my students think I’m pretty good at it too :).