Reflections - Week One

This week was a bit overwhelming. Being back at school after a thirty year hiatus was strange and at the same time, rather neat.

Questions flowing through my mind included:

·      What would my fellow-students be like?

·      What would the faculty be like?

·      Would I fit in?

·      Would I be able to keep up with the workload?

My feelings included mild terror (I know, if it’s really terror, it actually can’t be mild!) and second-guessing myself and this decision to go back to school.

And yet, at the same time, I felt more certain than ever that I want to be a teacher. It’s a bit like the Irish statement about death, “It’s not the bein’ dead that I’m a fearin;, it’s the dying!” It’s not the teaching I fear, but the process of getting there!

I’ve been impressed with two things this week:

First, the expectation that being effective teachers will require the willingness and the ability to see things through different eyes – to think outside the box, as it were – along with the assumption that we who have proven that we can learn (we made it through an an under-grad degree, after all) are expected in this programme to actually think! and

Second, the willingness of faculty to have us evaluate their teaching choices in our classes, as it were to put their own necks on the chopping block! That reveals trust in us, as well as a willingness – an eagerness even, to learn from us and from the experience of teaching us.