Being The Professor

I was talking to someone about my fall course recently. Like many end-stage graduate students, I am currently more than a little burned out, especially when contemplating the potent mix of dissertation-completing, teaching, and job-hunting that will be consuming my life for the next, oh, six to nine months. "The nice thing," I said about my fall class, "is that, if I run out of time for prep, I can pretty much stand up in front of the class and bullshit about gender and politics in the Middle East [the title of the class] for 110 minutes without any problem."

"It's not bullshit," my interlocutor said. "It's that you actually know what you're talking about."

***

Over my recent vacation, my father expressed interest in my dissertation. I offered to let him read a chapter (well, a part of a chapter that I just article-ized) on my Kindle, and handed it over. He handed it back, with six pages of hand-written typo corrections and suggestions for cleaning up the language, and then we sat down to talk about the infuriating Hannah Arendt quote I used as my epigraph. (I chose it because, in the context of my chapter, it is so obviously wrong it makes one want to scream.) I started going off on Arendt's particular use of the notion of the political, and how her position is fundamentally insupportable, just ranting, really, and, behind me, I heard my twelve year old nephew ask my wife if I always talk like this. "Just when she's teaching," my wife said. "That's her teacher voice."

***

Some people worry about turning into their mothers; Lord knows I do. But I realized recently that I'm turning into my professors. In fact, a friend pointed out that my current styling in the classroom is deeply reminiscent of one of my favorite instructors in college, a recent PhD who hung around for a year teaching, and on whom I had a massive, massive crush. (Hey! She was hot and butch and spoke more than one Southeast Asian language! I was helpless!)

I realize now I'm only a year behind where she was.

I wonder if, when she sat at the head of that round seminar table and waved her hands around, she was as terrified as I am every time I walk into the classroom.

I wonder if every argument she made, she was worried that there was someone in the room who would call her on it, would take her down for it.

I wonder if the obvious fangirling of her that I and some of my friends did gave her the same sort of warm fuzzy feeling that I get every time one of my students friends me on Facebook.

I wonder if the reason she so vigorously kept things (like her political affiliations, and her queerness) as far away from the classroom as she did (much to my frustration) was because it was another sort of danger.

I wonder if she had to fight the desire to smile every time we called her professor, because, God, I'm the professor now.

***

How do we decide when we are bullshitting, and when we are experts? This is the moment when impostor syndrome is at its most powerful, when we are totally unsure whether this thing we do is a fluke or because we really have mastered the material we've covered. Once you're at this stage, there isn't anybody left to give you clear marks on your work, to tell you that you're doing it right or wrong. I don't know if I'm an A student anymore; there are no more As, and that is a terrifying revelation, isn't it?

So the only thing to do is go forward. Put your head up. Send your articles to journals and pretend like doing so doesn't make you want to cry. Don't show weakness, because students are sharks and blood in the water is a scary, scary thing. Wear your sternest suit and make sure you've got things planned out. And know that every time you cross that threshold, it's not the students you have to prove your worth to; most of them have assumed it, because your name was next to the course title.

It's you. You need to know you deserve it. You need to prove it to yourself.