News From the Front #4 | I learn that I can teach texts I have never read before.

The majority of my semester is spent right now in Teaching assistant positions. One of the classes I'm TAing is the 400 level Modern Drama survey. I met with the other teachers of the class and we divided up the texts we would be teaching. They gave me The Laramie Project because of my experience with Documentary Theater, but I also got given O'Neill The Hairy Ape.

Not only is this a playwright I'm not a huge fan of, it was a play I had never read before. I was going to be teaching it in about three weeks. That time has come and gone, so I thought I would debrief on it really quick. I had to fill two full class periods. My first instinct was to go to a class discussion. This way I can get the students talking about it and not have to do a lot of lecture prep. I also did do some prep for some lecture on expressionism in the greater art world and more specifically expressionism and the theater. Talked a little about O'Neil himself. After this short lecture I opened it up for discussion lead by some pointed questions I had planned.

The discussion went less well than I hoped the first day. Part of this was my fault, i think partially because I was so nervous. It's hard to get a good discussion going in a class size that is upwards of thirty-three students. I'm used to my small classrooms of my undergrad where we were about ten or less. The biggest discussion classes I had were my honors classes early on that had about twenty students. In addition to that discussion is always harder early on in the semester when the students haven't gotten the feel of the class itself yet. However, I made it through the first day of discussion pretty much unscathed.

On the second day things went MUCH better. I felt a little better prepared and the discussion went a lot better. The students opened up a little bit more. I know it must be a little strange even having a new grad student coming in to teach. Especially once they learned how old I am. Most of the undergrad students are a year or so younger than me. After all I am right out of my undergrad. But I know a lot of that is my own insecurity about my performance as a teacher and my insecurity about what I do know about theater.

All I really needed to do was believe in myself, in my researching and in my abilities. In many ways these teaching sessions are our grad school tests. I passed the first one. I can breathe now.