Bad Feminist: Essays (4 page)

Ten minutes before my first class, I run to the bathroom and vomit. I’m afraid of public speaking, which makes teaching complicated.

When I walk into the classroom, the students stare at me like I’m in charge. They wait for me to say something. I stare back and wait for them to do something. It’s a silent power struggle. Finally, I tell them to do things and they do those things. I realize I am, in fact, in charge. We’ll be playing with Legos. For a few minutes I am awesome because I have brought toys.

Teaching three classes requires serious memorization when it comes to student names. The students tend to blur. It will take nearly three weeks for me to remember Ashley A. and Ashley M. and Matt and Matt and Mark and Mark and so on. I rely heavily on pointing. I color-code the students.
You in the green shirt. You in the orange hat.

I get my first paycheck. We are paid once a month, which requires the kind of budgeting I am incapable of. Life is unpleasant after the twenty-third or so. I’ve been a graduate student for so long it’s hard to fathom that one check can have four numbers and change. Then I see how much The Man takes. Damn The Man.

Students don’t know what to make of me. I wear jeans and Converse. I have tattoos up and down my arms. I’m tall. I am not petite. I am the child of immigrants. Many of my students have never had a black teacher before. I can’t help them with that. I’m the only black professor in my department. This will probably never change for the whole of my career, no matter where I teach. I’m used to it. I wish I weren’t. There seems to be some unspoken rule about the number of academic spaces people of color can occupy at the same time. I have grown weary of being the only one.

When I was a student listening to a boring professor drone endlessly, I usually thought,
I will never be that teacher
. One day, I am delivering a lecture and realize, in that moment, I am
that
teacher. I stare out at the students, most of them not taking notes, giving me that soul-crushing dead-eye stare that tells me,
I wish I were anywhere but here
. I think,
I wish I were anywhere but here
. I talk faster and faster to put us all out of our misery. I become incoherent. Their dead-eye stares haunt me for the rest of the day, then longer.

I keep in touch with my closest friend from graduate school. We both really enjoy our new jobs, but the learning curve is steep. There is no shallow end. We dance around metaphors about drowning. During long conversations we question the choice to be proper, modern women. There is so much grading. There’s a lot to be said for barefoot kitchen work when staring down a stack of research papers.

Walking down the hall, I hear a young woman saying “Dr. Gay” over and over and think,
That Dr. Gay is rather rude for ignoring that poor student
. I turn around to say something before I realize she is talking to me.

I worry some of my students don’t own any clothes with zippers or buttons or other methods of closure and fastening. I see a lot of words faded and stretched across asses, bra straps, pajama pants, often ill-fitting. In the winter, when there is snow and ice outside, boys come to class in basketball shorts and flip-flops. I worry about their feet, their poor little toes.

Helicopter parents e-mail me for information about their children.
How is my son doing? Is my daughter attending class?
I encourage them to open lines of communication with their children. I politely tell them there are laws preventing such communication without their child’s written consent. The child rarely consents.

There is nothing new in the new town, and I know no one. The town is a flat, scarred strip of land with half-abandoned strip malls. And then there is the corn, so much of it, everywhere, stretching in every direction for miles. Most of my colleagues live fifty miles away. Most of my colleagues have families. I go north to Chicago. I go east to Indianapolis. I go south to St. Louis. I take up competitive Scrabble and win the first tournament I enter. In the last round, I encounter a nemesis who gets so angry when I beat him he refuses to shake my hand and flounces out of the tournament in a huff. The sweetness of that victory lingers. The next time I see him, at another tournament, he’ll point and say, “Best two out of three. Best. Two. Out. Of. Three.” I best him in two out of three.

My own parents ask,
How is my daughter doing?
I offer them some version of the truth.

Sometimes, during class, I catch students staring at their cell phones beneath their desks like they’re in a cone of invisibility. It’s as funny as it is irritating. Sometimes, I cannot help but say, “I do see you.” Other times, I confiscate their electronic devices.

Sometimes, when students are doing group work, I sneak a look at my own phone like I am in a cone of invisibility. I am part of the problem.

I try to make class fun, engaging,
experiential
. We hold a mock debate about social issues in composition. We use Twitter to learn about crafting microcontent in new media writing. We play
Jeopardy!
to learn about professional reports in professional writing. College and kindergarten aren’t as different as you’d think. Every day, I wonder,
How do I keep these students meaningfully engaged, educated, and entertained for fifty minutes? How do I keep them from staring at me with dead eyes? How do I make them want to learn?
It’s tiring. Sometimes, I think the answer to each of these questions is
I can’t
.

There is a plague on grandmothers. The elder relations of my students begin passing away at an alarming rate one week. I want to warn the surviving grandmothers, somehow. I want them to live. The excuses students come up with for absences and homework amuse me in how ludicrous and improbable they are. They think I want to know. They think I need their explanations. They think I don’t know they’re lying. Sometimes I simply say, “I know you are lying. You say it best when you say nothing at all.”

I try not to be old. I try not to think,
When I was your age
. . . , but often, I do remember when I was their age. I enjoyed school; I loved learning and worked hard. Most of the people I went to school with did too. We partied hard, but we still showed up to class and did what we had to do. An alarming number of my students don’t seem to
want
to be in college. They are in school because they don’t feel they have a choice or have nothing better to do; because their parents are making them attend college; because, like most of us, they’ve surrendered to the rhetoric that to succeed in this country you need a college degree. They are not necessarily incorrect. And yet, all too often, I find myself wishing I could teach more students who actually want to be in school, who don’t resent the education being
foisted
upon them. I wish there were viable alternatives for students who would rather be anywhere but in a classroom. I wish, in all things, for a perfect world.

A number of students find my website. This is teaching in the digital age. They find my writing, much of which is, shall we say, explicit in nature. News travels fast. They want to talk to me about these things in the hall after class, in my office, out and about on campus. It’s awkward and flattering but mostly awkward. They also know too much about my personal life. They know about the random guy who spent the night, who helped me kill a couple bottles of wine and made me breakfast. I have to start blogging differently.

I get along with the students. They are generally bright and charming even when they are frustrating. They make me love my job both in and out of the classroom. Students show up at my office to discuss their personal problems. I try to maintain boundaries. There are breakups with long-term boyfriends and bad dates and a lecherous professor in another department and a roommate who leaves her door open while she’s getting nailed and this thing that happened at the bar on Friday and difficult decisions about whether to go to graduate school or go on the job market. Each of these situations is a crisis. I listen and try to dispense the proper advice. This is not the same advice my friends and I give to one another. What I really want to say to these students, most of them young women, is “GIRL!”

I am quite content to be in my thirties, and nothing affirms that more than being around people in their late teens and early twenties.

In grad school, we heard lurid tales of department meetings where heated words were exchanged and members of various factions almost came to blows. I was looking forward to the drama, only to learn my department meets once or twice a semester rather than every week. Instead, we meet in committees. The chairs of those committees report to the department chair. Committee meetings are not my favorite part of the job. There are politics and agendas and decades of history of which I know little and understand even less. Everyone means well, but there’s a lot of bureaucracy. I prefer common sense.

The first semester ends and I receive my evaluations. Most of the students think I did a decent job, some think I did a great job, but then there are those who didn’t. I assign too much work, they say. I expect too much. I don’t consider these faults. A student writes, “Typical first year professor.” I have no idea what that means.

Over winter break, my friend from graduate school and I have another long lamentation about choices and taking jobs in the middle of nowhere and the (relative) sacrifices academics must often make. It is tiring to constantly be told
how lucky we are
. Luck and loneliness, it would seem, are very compatible.

I go drinking with the guy I . . . go drinking with. To call it dating would be a stretch. We are a matter of convenience. I sip on a T&T and lament my evaluations. I want to be a good teacher, and most days, I think I am. I give a damn. I want students to
like
me. I am human. I am so full of want. He tells me not to worry with such authority I almost believe him. He orders me another drink and another. I hope we don’t run into any of my students because I cannot pull off professorial in my current state. That’s always my prayer when we go out. Because of this, we often end up in the city fifty miles up the road. At the end of the night, two very short men get into a fight. Clothing is torn. We stand in the parking lot and watch. The men’s anger, the white heat of it, fascinates me. Later, after taking a cab home, I drunkenly call the man I left behind, the man who didn’t follow me. “My students hate me,” I say. He assures me they don’t. He says that would not be possible. I say, “Everything is terrible. Everything is great.” He says, “I know.”

Another semester begins, three new classes. Winter settles, ice everywhere, barren plains. There are three new sets of students, different faces but similar names.
Hey you in the khaki hat. Hey you with the purple hair.

The goal, we are told, is tenure. To that end all faculty, even first-year professors, have to compile an annual portfolio. I assemble a record of one semester’s worth of work. I try to quantify my professional worth. My colleagues write letters to attest to my various accomplishments, verifying I am on such and such committee, that I participated in such and such event, that I am a valuable and contributing member of the department. I update my vita. I clip publications. I buy a neon-green three-ring binder. This is how I rage against the machine. I spend an afternoon collating and creating labels and writing about myself with equal parts humility and bravado. It’s a fine balance. Later, I tell a friend, “It was like arts and crafts for adults. I went to graduate school for this.”

I stop getting lost looking for the bathroom. The building is strange, with many hallways, some hidden, and an arcane numbering system that defies logic. When I leave my door open, students passing by will ask, “Where is Dr. So-and-So’s office?” I say, “I have no idea.”

Summer, we are told, is a time for rest, relaxation, and catching up. I teach two classes. I write a novel. I return to the place I moved from, spend weeks with the man I left behind. He says,
Don’t go
. I say,
Please follow
. We remain at an impasse. I return to the cornfield. There are mere weeks of summer left. They are not enough.

A new semester begins. I have new responsibilities, including chairing a committee. Ten minutes before the first class on the first day, I run to the bathroom and puke. In my classroom, I stare at another group of students whose names I will have to remember.
You in the red shirt. You with the pink shorts
. I refuse to expect less. I try to learn better, do better. I have no idea how I got to be the one at the front of the classroom, the one who gets to be in charge of things. Most of the time, I feel like the kid who gets to sit at the adult table for the first time at Thanksgiving. I’m not sure which fork to use. My feet can’t reach the floor.

My third tournament started with a brutal game where I lost by more than 200 points. I was the fifth seed, ranked like tennis with words, and feeling confident—too confident, really. “We Are the Champions” may have been on an infinite loop in my head. And yet. It was also early on a Saturday morning. I am not a morning person. Before the tournament started, people milled around the hotel meeting room, chatting idly about the heat, what we had done since the last time many of us had seen one another (the previous tournament in Illinois), and some of the more amazing plays we had made recently.

Scrabble
²
players love to talk, at length, with some repetition, about their vocabulary triumphs.

There were twenty-one of us with various levels of ability, but really, if you’re playing this game at the competitive level, you generally have some skill and can be a contender. The more experienced players, the Dragos to my Rocky, studied word lists and appeared intensely focused on something the rest of us couldn’t see. Many wore fanny packs without irony—serious fanny packs bulging with mystery. As I waited for the tournament to begin, I studied the table of game-related accessories—books, a travel set, a towel, a deluxe board, and some milled French soaps clearly taken from someone’s closet—all for drawings to be held later in the day.
³