Week One of Teaching: Controlling My Face

Daniel Williams
Sep 1, 2018 · 3 min read

It happens every fall semester.

For the first several weeks of teaching, summer pours down its worst heat.

Most of my classes are in a building without air conditioning, and I’m one of those people who sweats.

It’s serious.

I sweat so badly I have to bring changes of clothing to school.

I hate changing at school. Whether locked in my office or a bathroom, it doesn’t matter. What if I get distracted by an emergency phone call and run out of there in bare feet, or naked?

This would probably make an emergency worse, and it would certainly create a new emergency: loss of job.

New-job interviewer: “And why did you decide to leave Geneva College?”
Me: “Their intolerance for accidental nakedness.”

The heat is here and the risks are high.

I’m up front. I’m drippy. I want to run home. I want to be air-lifted and set down somewhere many countries away, where there’s a breeze, where the people are accepting of those who leak.

I melt like a candle. I shine.

My self-esteem is gone and I am bitter, capable of lashing out over the usual student problems: laziness, arrogance, meanness, smarter-than-me-ness.

Monstering

But I can’t lash out.

Interviewer: “Why did you leave Geneva College?”
Me: “I had a little accident with my foot. It kicked someone’s head.”

People say, “Fake it till you make it,” but faking it requires freakish strength, and is this good for my body?

You’ve heard the stories.

A car has landed on a child. Mother finds out. She picks up the car, flips it over, and the kid is fine.

Mother, however, is not fine.

Adrenaline and heavy-lifting can destroy one’s body. The saved youngster is able to get back to happily playing in the road, but mother’s feat of strength has reduced her to a screaming pile of torn muscle and bone-chips.

Her kid’s alive (whoopee!), but she’ll limp for the rest of her life.

I worry.

What’s happening inside me when I apply flipping-mother force to my face, making it cheerful under sheets of sweat, or making it calm and kind when all my face wants to do is bite off the heads of songbirds and spit them at my students?

Does this application of strength make me stronger? Or is all my heavy-lifting turning me into a broken down hero?

Time will tell. Though does it matter how broken I become if I love the work? And I do.

Plus, this is just week one.

I have a feeling week two will be perfect, crisp and windy, and littered with students eager to beam at me with their happy faces.

High Beaming
Daniel Williams
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