Last week held the first day of class, and first days are always gilded in importance.

I am an adjunct professor. I have been an adjunct professor for eight years now. I never meant for a “part-time” position to last this long. Eight years. And eight years seems to imply a necessity to qualify it as “full-time,” but in my defense, I have finagled multiple “part-time” positions concurrently that have ended up demanding more time and attention than a “full-time” one. So there you have it: part-time title, part-time wages, and part-time benefits for a full-time commitment. You do the math.

Back to my point (that is if I indeed have one!) Last week was the first day of class. Originally I was going to philosophize about the first day of class, but since this is actually a thought expressed on now the fourth day of class, I figured I would allow the first week the ability to have the power of the first day. And because I have the part-time luxury, I have been able to teach at multiple facilities and more often than most full-time professors… so I have, for only eight years of teaching, witnessed the blossoming of many first weeks of classes.

For me the process is a painful one. I am a horrific ball of anxiety for about a week before about whether I’m prepared enough, is the textbook good, will the classroom suck, will the class hate me, will I hate them, will I embarrass myself, will we learn anything? The list drones on. The twenty four hours before are agonizing; I do not sleep. (Imagine if I had I high stress job!) And inevitably, all my fears are for naught. Not that those fears were unnecessary, the classrooms have sucked and the textbooks have been much less than desired, but fortunately the class hasn’t hated me and I haven’t hated them, and I have always been good for at least one whooper of an embarrassing moment… I survive, they laugh, and I usually do too. And we learn.

I think that is why I like the role of professor… the learning. Sure, I have spent more time, energy and focus than most of my students have on a topic. I have more experience with the subjects that I teach than they do, but WE learn. I am as much a learner in that classroom as they are. I have learned a wealth of things from my students. OK, some of the things I’ve learned really only confirms that potty humor crosses the age gap uniformly– I’ve had nine year old students who have been lost in the mirth of poop and I’ve had eighty two year old students who have been lost in the mirth of poop, and every age student in between. But then I’ve been witness to some of the most profound moments that illuminate our common humanity.

A number of years ago I did a playmaking weekend with a group called the “State Street Project.” Without describing the entire process, it was a weekend where a number of adult theater artists and a larger number of nine to thirteen year olds from inner city Trenton went to upstate New York with the goal of helping these youngsters write a play of their own. It was late autumn, maybe the weekend before Halloween, and all of the children and a number of us adults went to a local pumpkin festival to blow off some steam before we sat down to some serious playmaking. A number of the young girls had latched on to me (and I to them!) and it became apparent to all of us that a large group of ethnically diverse children was an uncommon sight in this town. The girls who I was painting pumpkins with and I went into the bathroom to wash our hands. One of the girls, the youngest at nine, Courtland, looked in the mirror at our reflections and said, “You’re not white you know. You’re more pinkish khaki. And I’m more like chocolate than black. But we both have the same face.” My reply? “You are absolutely right.” There was no awkward uncomfortable moment which sometimes happens when issues of racial diversity came into dialogue. It was simply stated, not to challenge, just a true observation of the young face and the older face reflected in the mirror. Her subtext seemed to move beyond color, beyond age and beyond any of those markers that we use to label. We were two faces in a mirror. We just were.

Why use this moment to segue into the topic I am really here to address… we’ll see. So I had this gift from Courtland to carry with me, and I do. Every class I walk into, I feel the same way; I ask the same questions of myself: how do we find the common ground? How do we make a community from the randomness of its components? These components, or rather students, are students who have chosen to take the class, chosen me as their instructor, or they’ve chosen the time slot, or the fact it is a prerequisite to the real class they want, or they had to take this class because it was the only one that fit into their schedule, or they took it because their best friend is taking it too, or because they thought it might be fun. (Right now I’m teaching composition, in the past I’ve taught creative writing and acting classes– the latter two often get the “fun” comment… composition ALWAYS elicits the “have to.”) For whatever reason they are in that room, at that time, it is my job to facilitate a community.

I use this idea of “facilitating a community” because as any teacher knows: the group of students dictates whether the class is a “good” one or not, it is rarely the teacher. The success of a class is the result of the laws of group dynamics. No class is ever the same as the one the semester before it even if the material is, even if the class members are. It is a temporal experience– and from class to class, first to last, the dynamic ebbs and flows. I guess that explains my pre-class anxiety: walking into that room is a venture into an ever changing unknown. And until now, I have always walked into class hoping for a happy accident of luck—this class will be a “good” one.

This semester I have been asked to be a part of a pilot program to integrate different “disciplinary epistemologies” into the composition classroom. So what are we doing? We are looking at how scientists write and relate differently to their subject than historians to theirs or English teachers to theirs. Our goal is to hopefully have students be better prepared to learn and write within the different genres they will be operating within in a liberal arts university. And this challenge has thrilled me beyond belief!

Look, most kids hate composition class. Composition is really hard work. Writing is a revealing discipline, it is your thoughts, your beliefs, your words, and in the academic environment you sometimes have to present them as less “yours” because they have to be supported by someone else’s thoughts, beliefs and words… all while you are struggling to figure out what the heck you think in the first place. And many times you, the student, are struggling with the material as well. (And many are students who are still in the later throes of puberty– an unpleasant addition to all of this!) It’s an awkward set up that actually does work. It allows us an instructive failure. We can try our ideas out, and in needing to articulate them we learn about what we know and don’t know about a subject. We learn what we didn’t know we knew and what we knew we knew. In the success or failure of the attempt of writing the composition about a particular subject, we are set up with the next step we need to practice to get to the next level. Although it can, success tends not to instruct us as well as failure. By wrestling with the process of getting thought into words so that we can share the images of our world with another, we clarify our lens that we see the world through. We learn about the world and ourselves.

What has been most inspiring about focusing on introducing these relationships has been the process this semester of grafting together the lessons, readings and ideas that I think might serve this purpose best— and in addition to including the readings that our team has agreed will be standards for this pilot, have been perusing the readings that have been recommended to aide in understanding the challenges we face in introducing the lofty goal of “disciplinary epistemologies.” Some of these essays have made it into my syllabus. I believe that my fellow learners need to understand the context for the skills that we are trying to introduce to them.

Independent of this material, I encountered an excerpted essay called The Community of Truth by Parker J. Palmer from his book, The Courage to Teach. Here was an essay that outlined many of the views that I held about teaching and learning but had not read before. I encourage you to read it for yourself. The ideas challenge traditional models of instructor/ learner relationships and in defining the learning dynamic as one of community, it allows for collaboration and scholarly confrontation, a win/win for those of us who are passionate about teaching and learning. And by shifting the titles from expert and amateur to the titles of learners or knowers, we shift the dynamic of the class from one of distance to one of community. We all, student and instructor, have an investment in the relationship to the subject. We all contribute to the community of learning by sharing our experiences about the subject and the community surrounding that subject. The community becomes a dialogue… and participating in a community doesn’t negate the greater experience that the “instructor” of the class has. The community needs that person’s example of how to operate within the genres that form around the subject; they need the model of the behavior so that they to may develop a deeper relationship to the subject themselves. And by allowing for the community we allow for the diversity that community demands.

So this first week of class I walked into the room with an explicit goal: facilitate a community of learners. And I walked in with a commitment to sharing that goal from the onset. I shared with my fellow learners the context that this commitment had evolved from as much as possible. This proves difficult because the context is so intrinsically linked to the experiences of me: what I have read, experiences I have had, teachers I have learned from and ones I have not, essays I have read, reread, and written, and well, every aspect of my existence has cultivated the context I bring to this endeavor. So I have been stuck with sharing the essays that I think might help them to “see” writing and learning with the passion I “see” it with.

I am thrilled so far with this community that I am trying to facilitate. I am thrilled by the ideas they share. I am hopeful that they will be inspired by the ideas we are reading and the thoughts we are sharing. I believe through this relationship they will find a relationship to these subjects that is as fulfilling as the one I have. And I am confident that they will leave with an awareness of the demands that the different genres that surround a subject have. But what I hold most dear as a gift for them to leave with is that they will see we are all a community of learners. That we are part of a community and that community demands diversity. For them I wish the gift that Courtland gave me: that when they look in the mirror, they see that we all have the same face.