Intro

Learning how to be a teacher is no picnic, but the experience is worse when you happen to be a person who speaks two octaves higher than your students and finish your phrases with even higher tonal fluctuations. Not only do I speak in questions, but my body language belies underlying social anxieties which diminish my ability to authoritatively organize adolescents. On my worst days, they can eat me like a snack. On my best--well, so far my best is a phenomenon for which I patiently await. I may wait awhile; it's a good thing I am self-supplied in terms of the edible.

As a student teacher, I am just beginning to take over two classes. Today I taught "Harrison Bergeron" to the sophomores, and I attempted to teach transcendentalism, symbolism, the impact of Hawthorne on American literature, and "Young Goodman Brown" to the seniors. Both of these lessons flopped. Over. Dead. As I tried to convey the vast scale of my failure in a conversation with a friend and fellow student teacher, I honed in on my body posture as symbolic of all that went wrong.

"I was sitting crouched over the text with my nose almost touching the top of my desk while my knees hit the desk from the bottom," I miserably recounted. "And it only got worse from there! With every poorly directed question, my voice got quieter and higher, until by the end of the lesson I was substituting whispered squeaks for teacher talk."

"Ah," he replied knowingly. "You went fetal. I do it too."

I paused, struck by the aptness of his descriptive. "Fetal?" I responded. "Yes, I suppose went fetal."

My loose interpretations of teaching are probably more embryonic than fetal--but, in the sense that the latter term references the vastly underdeveloped, I approve of its application to my experience.

After I decided three hours ago to start a blog, I considered, among other titles, "cowering in the classroom," and any number of plays which involved the word "groveling." However, I decided on "The Paved Road" for several reasons. First of all, as much as I adore self-deprecating alliterative play, the phrases I came up with were trite and finite. "The Paved Road," while allowing ample space for downplay of self, also opens the possibility that this journey might not be confined to the realm of para-professional failure. (However, the emphasis still feels satisfactorily centered on the the vehicular nature of good intentions which unfailingly transport me to infernal realms.)

Secondly, "The Paved Road" has been trodden before. I am not the first aspiring teacher to encounter difficulty--nor am I the first student teacher to frequently fail miserably at the task of teaching. This path, however humiliatingly hot, has been trekked before. I tread in company.