If I Only Had A Brain.......

I often wish I were an expert in something.  I really really do.  I ahve wanted to be brilliant at something for as long as I can remember.  Wanted to be an authority on some subject, an imortant voice in some field.

You'd think, after all my years of training and the title of Master, that I might qualify as at least a demiexpert of theatre, but you'd be wrong.  I find my mind is rather like a sieve these days, and all that I once knew about the theatre, about acting, about drama, has leaked out slowly over time and has not been replenished~ not with anything worth a damn anyway.

I have a student at my thursday night job that wants to quit the program.  She has pretty much wanted to quit since I replaced their last year's drama teacher (Who over-booked herself and got lyme disease or something and found she couldn't finish the year).  I thought I was making progress with her, but the other night, when I asked her why she felt she wanted to leave, she told me she felt like she wasn't learning as much as she did last year.

Always a fun thing for a teacher to hear.  It knocked the wind out of me.  Now I spoke to her at length and impressed upon her that in her second year of advanced drama she would naturally hear repeated concepts, revisit topics from last year, but that to progress forward with her talent and potential she would need to meet me half way.  How many homework assignments had I sent them home with, and how many times had she come unprepared to class?  I gently told her that in the world of acting classes and theatre and such, such an actor would be quickly bypassed in favor of the ones who would come prepared and ready to grow.  I told her I had lots to teach her and would love to help her develop her skill, but that I can't do all the work for her.

All valid points.  Of course she learned more last year, right?  When you've never taken a drama class before of course the first year will seem the most exciting, will  move quickly and seem to challenge always.

But.

But if I'm honest with myself, I have to be fair and wonder if the girl has a point. 

If I am perfectly candid here with myself and with whoever reads this largely ignored nook of cyberspace, I have to confess that I really don't believe myself to be a very effective teacher.  Sure there are somedays when I'm on, when I've had a good lesson or made some headway, but if I really think about it objectively...and if I compare the work I do with the work of all the professors I've been priveleged enough to know and study under?

I'm ashamed of myself.

And shaken. 

I have so many high ideals.  I have so many ideas for how education should be structured.  But do I put any of that into action?  Have I ever, ever, ever had an inspirational lesson, or a spectacular unit? Or made any lasting impressions?

Whoa.  This is alot harder than I thought it would be, admitting this.  Admitting a weakness is something I thought I was well accustomed to.  But this hit me harder than other shortcomings.  Maybe because I really wanted to be good at this?  Maybe because I have had such inspirational, life-changing mentors and educators along the way, and my personal lackluster performance is a shoddy way to repay their gifts to me?  Maybe because I am letting down every one of the shapeable minds that has been entrusted to my tutelage?

Maybe because it feels like absolute shit, realizing you've more or less wasted a life.

The productive thing to do, the go-get-em plan of attack here would be to recommitt myself to the goal of becoming the best teacher I can be; to learn and grow everyday and to challenge myself to do better, to be better.  Lesson plan more agressively.  Think more creatively.  Get energized!  Go the distance.  Live and breathe inspiration and art!

And maybe I will.  I certainly want to do all that.  It seems like the right thing to do, certainly.


But I feel defeated.  In all honesty.  I feel exposed for the fraud that I've been afraid that I secretly was all this time, and I feel like the jig is up, so to speak.  I want to bury my head in the sand, or in a soft pillow and figure out some way to switch careers before I spend my whole like wearing a mask and pretending like I'm any good at all.

Because I feel terror and dread and angst every single time I have to teach.  That isn't healthy.  Or I feel apathetic, lazy, and disinterested, which might actually be worse!  It is very rarely that I go into a lesson feeling jazzed and pumped and confident.  So rarely that I honestly couldn't tell you the last time I felt it.

Now all this is more than a problem, it is a downright crisis of identity, is it not?  Besides which I have big plans for this summer that involve me delivering on the promise that I'm qualified and able to teach drama 5 days a week with enthusiasm, inventiveness, passion and heart.  Now it is very possible that this may well turn out to be the case.  I believe in the group with all my heart (though this will be the 1st time that I will actually funtion as a main player of said group, which makes me nervous), I believe in the leadership unwaveringly, and some bright corner of my heart holds out faith that this summer may just be the renaissance I have been searching for.

The darker corners of my heart, or maybe the perfectly frank center of my brain argues that this is an awful lot of pressure to put on something tentative and fragile as this summer's endeavor.  Something tells me that I had better bring answers TO the program, rather than burden the project with all my needy co-dependent bullshit.  How can any one job hold all the answers for a person?  It isn't possible, and worse?  It isn't fair to my colleagues, the student or the fledgeling rpogram to force all my hopes and dreams for the future onto it's struggling shoulders.

My heart is heavy with the knowledge that I have failed my students this year.  Heavy with the knowledge that I feel like a hack almost all the time.  Heavy with the idea that I NEED to be pursuing this career with a single-minded commitment, but am oscillating and wavering and likely to lose job opportunities because of my insecurities.

But truly?  I know a little about a broad range of theatre topics.  I know parlor tricks.  I am unisnpired and undereducated (not under credentialed, of course, those are, unfortunatley for me, quite different classifications!), underwhelming, and under some sort of malaise that simply saps my will and my motivation to be better.

I should be trying to know more about theatre, about teaching, about anything.  Instead I indulge in masturbatory creative writing that serves absolutely no purpose.  Instead I veg in front of the tv on shows I hardly find amusing, but which go a long way to deadening the feeling of anxiety that always seems to be mounting in my breast these days.  Instead I read books and play games and do anything other than what I should be dedicating my life to doing.

I am not fit to teach.  I am unworthy of the profession.  Of the art.  of the distinction.

And I am truly sorry about that fact.

But I don't know if I will take any drastic action to correct my present course.

And that is one of the things I hate most about myself.