On Teaching, Imposter Syndrome, and the Hazards of Homonyms
The climb up the ladder to a better life can be precarious.
“I am a liar,” Tony said in my English composition class.
To prepare for a writing assignment, I was leading my students in a discussion of identity markers: race, gender, socio-economic status. As usual during our class sessions, Tony had been sitting slumped in his seat, arms folded over his chest, staring at me, smirking.
“That’s my identity,” he said. “I’m a liar.”
In the 1990s, I was working as a graduate assistant at West Virginia University, helping to pay for my education by teaching sections of the university’s freshman writing classes. Tony’s comment, I suspected, was another attempt among college students to create a stumbling block for someone they could easily recognize as a novice instructor.
Some of his classmates laughed. Others shifted in their seats uncomfortably, perhaps prodded by the cognitive dissonance prompted by a liar making what seemed to be such an honest confession. If he was lying about being a liar, did the confession cancel itself out, kind of like a double negative? If he was telling the truth about being a liar, why was he doing it? Didn’t the truthful confession…
