I have now been teaching first-year writing courses for three years. By far the best and worst part, intellectually, is the dawning realization of all of the things I don’t know.

I’m told this is a common phenomenon for people in academia, graduate students especially. We think we know a lot about a topic. We get a little education. We find gaps in our knowledge. I imagine this process like a giant world map, one of those old ones in sepia tan and brown lines, as I slowly scrawl in the map of my knowledge. For every inlet and cove I fill in, there’s a continent behind it I have yet to scrawl over. There’s some lingering frustration there. That needy drive that has pushed me this far tries to figure out ways to learn more faster, but with that increasing knowledge comes the acceptance that I discover that knowledge with time rather than speed.

I’m comforted by the realization that three years in, I’ve learned more about teaching than I know about almost anything else. At this rate, I’ll surely be an expert in three more years. Right?

Before student-centered learning and the flipped classroom and speaking rights were in my vocabulary, I spent an uninspired five years flipping through various Norton Anthologies as an undergraduate English major at a university in Arkansas that most people in Arkansas can’t remember. I could wax philosophical about going from being a music major to an English major to several more uninspired years largely reading novels and being someone else’s assistant manager. I could even go all the way back to the beginning when I was twelve and my mom’s half-brother, two years my senior and playing at being psychic for my younger siblings, foretold that I would be an English teacher and how I spent the next half of my life trying to make sure that wouldn’t happen. However, I have written probably a dozen reflective essays that have mentioned all of these things in various iterations, and I’m tired of it. I’ll save my final retelling for my memoir.

Instead, I’ll get to the point. Like a lot of people, I suspect, who decide to get Ph. Ds, I largely considered teaching to be the thing I had to do to get to do the thing I wanted to do. With fewer prepositions, I thought of teaching as one of the costs of getting to research and write for a living. But then my inner perfectionist, the one that has been so afraid of failure that it paralyzed me from trying during the uninspired years, gave me a little nudge, and I actually gave a damn beyond doing enough to keep various professors off my back.

So here’s what I did well: I think I really connected well with my students. I built an atmosphere where I balanced students respecting me while feeling like I was actually someone who cared about them personally. I planned lessons around altering the rhetorical situation of the classroom: I tried to make the student the creator of knowledge, their classmates the audience, and myself conductor of classroom activities. I taught some interesting lessons and kept my students engaged in the writing process.

Here’s what I did less well: I don’t think I was totally successful with the researched essay unit. I could chalk this up to the Covid-19 issues, but I’m not sure that’s totally it. I get a sense like students were struggling with synthesizing research and building an argument. Thus far, the research essays I’ve graded have been solid, so perhaps my students understood the lessons but were unclear about my criteria for success. I introduced the structure and organization of the research essay genre too late in the unit. Perhaps this is an opportunity to improve my teaching overall. While I made it work, I do wonder if introducing the conventions of writing genres early in the unit will stifle creativity or give students a firmer foundation on which they can experiment with their writing.

Here’s what I need to work on: I really struggled this year with getting engagement from my late afternoon classes. Both in the fall and spring, my earlier class was responsive, engaged, and contientous of completing their work. My later classes rarely came to class prepared, were difficult to engage, and were slow or haphazard with their work. Sure, some classes are not great classes, but I’d really like to work on reaching students who aren’t as engaged.

Here’s what I’ll keep doing: I really enjoyed doing activities with students in the classroom. Though many of my students have writing anxiety, the modeling, practical lessons, and scaffolded exercises reached a lot of my students and seemed to give them a sense of control over their assignments. I taught many of my students in both the fall and spring semester, and students in the spring seemed more focused on skills acquisition over giving me “what I want to see” in a writing assignment.

I’m really looking forward to next year. I think I’ve developed a lot of really interesting, useful techniques for teaching writing and managing a classroom. My students seem to really like me, which I like, of course. More than that, I think they actually learned something, so I’m taking that as a win.