The Effort of Teaching

I teach a class of 16 girls. The other day after class was dismissed, I was lagging behind cleaning up my materials while the students for the next class were coming into the room. One of the guys hesitantly asked me "Can I just ask, for curiosity, what class this is that you teach? It's all girls....... and you're a guy teacher." I suppose he was looking for some interesting answer like Cooking and Child Rearing 101, or Knitting for the Modern American Woman, but I had to give him the blase answer of Storytelling. Don't ask me how this happened. They filled up the class and had it closed before any guys could register for the class. Granted, there's not a LOT of guys who wind up registering for Storytelling, but there are a few of the Speech majors, and at least one that would've been in this class this semester had it not already been full. But alack, alas, he was too late. I actually have 17 people in my class since one of my students is married and pregnant, but they're not saying whether our smallest participant is a boy or girl yet, so I still may be the only guy present. Besides, he/she is really pretty quiet and doesn't contribute much to the classroom environment other than to make his/her mother shift uncomfortably in her desk, so I tend to think of my class as just 16 girls.

Teaching a class of 16 girls has it's challenges, particularly when they are not in your field of study. 95% of these girls are Education or Youth Ministries majors, and are only taking Storytelling because they have to. They're not used to the slightly-less-structured colorful flow of an interpretation class. When we first started the semester, all 16 of them would sit there in complete silence and stare at me with expressionless faces while I spoke. I wasn't used to that and I must say it unnerved me no small amount. Granted, I want my students to pay attention; I don't want them tooting trumpets and banging drums while I attempt to lecture, but you don't have to sit there in complete silence and stare. My attempts to thaw out the temperature of the room with some light witticism or unexpected humor were often greeted with uncomprehending faces. Sigh, tough crowd.

Now, I'm happy to say, it's a completely different class. I walked in to class the other day and the entire room was one mass of chatter, people standing around in little groups and animation and emotion bouncing off the walls. Our class is often punctuated with bouts of laughter, and generally my students look happy to be there. They feel comfortable enough to tease me at times (usually without crossing the line), and they can take a little hard time from me. It does a teacher's heart good. And, I hope, somewhere in the middle of all this, they're learning how to be better communicators.

God Bless,
--Nick