LY #15: The last first day of classes

Today has been my last first day of classes.  Well, actually tomorrow is my last first day, if we count actually meeting a class face to face.

Returning each fall is exciting and scary.  I spend so much of my summers working by myself that jumping back into the large group setting of a classroom inside a large institution is always a bit of a shock, like leaping into a lake fed by a glacier.  Bracing!

My husband used to say that the first couple of years he was retired he only missed school in the fall. I imagine I'll share that fate.  So we plan to travel in the fall.

Birdy Fall 2012

In the old days, when I spent some of my summers in school, first as a student and then as a teaching assistant, I wasn't as challenged by my return to the classroom because I hadn't been so long away from it.  But whether or not I've spent my summers free or as a wage slave,  I've always looked forward to getting back to the regular school year. 

Not that I haven't been anxious!  It used to  take me time to get over the culture shock of new people and a new "leader" each year. Even so, once I had the situation sussed each year I enjoyed most of my classroom. I enjoyed learning and "being myself" in a way I couldn't at home.  Now that I'm a teacher, it's topsy turvy and I'm more "myself" at home than I am at school! 

Nw Wall St. Fall 2012

I also enjoy the first day because it's associated both with my birthday and the sad exaltation of autumn, my favorite time of year.  The time of the red trees.

Good teacher, bad test writer, great students?

It's a conundrum. (Which, according to the online Merriam Webster dates from 1645 and means "1: a riddle whose answer is or involves a pun 2 a: a question or problem having only a conjectural answer b: an intricate and difficult problem.")

The teams all got between B and A on their midterms. One team was through in 15 minutes with what was supposed to be a 40 minute exam. Sigh. In one way I'm very happy for them. In another way I feel like a total palooka. (thirties slang, boys and girls)

In another part of my life, a colleague wandered over to my blog and read the stuff about charmers and stoners. He's a guy whose life pretty much revolves around getting people to give money to a worthy cause so he's got to use charm or, as he put it, being "directly engaged". I'll do something a bit suspect and quote him, without his permission or his name. He said,

"Well, somehow I ended up at your blog (which I enjoyed—I quickly reviewed all the way down to stoned and charmed) and liked the thought you gave me on people being charming. Maybe the difference is that between being directly engaged and being charming, the latter having an element of working a situation. And who likes to feel they are being worked?"

He believes in his cause (as do I) and he has ferocious charm and some good looks (slender, great cheekbones, intense eyes). I told him that sometimes being "worked" is what is called for. And that made me think a lot about communication and why I love studying it and why it's such an important topic. I don't think life is ever as easy as: "Just be real." "Just be yourself." I think that's a ration of horse patootie (as Col. Potter used to say) made popular by money grubbing gurus in the 1960s, '70s.

My question is, in a postmodern world is authenticity even possible? What is authenticity? How much of our communication is "of the moment"? If I am responding absolutely authentically to you, and then tomorrow I have to respond absolutely authentically to someone who dislikes you, but I like you both, does that mean that I am inauthentic when I say I like you or inauthentic when, the next day I say I like your enemy? Are we past Aristotle? Is the virtuous man no longer the consistent one? Or is virtue only a matter of consistency within a given parameter? If communication is a matter of transactions (I give you attention, you give me attention. I give you praise, you give me fidelity, etc.) how can an economics of friendship be wrong? And yet we tend to think of relationships as being outside of economics.

And now, just to be "authentic" and "honest," I will tell him I talked about him on my blog. Heck, this set of utterances can't be only about boring classroom stuff. Gotta engage directly with some actual communication issues.