A Place to Cut Your Teeth
Dr. Paula Garrett | November 1, 2023
I’m a professor of English, but in my class this week, history repeated itself.
When I was in undergrad, one of my professors pulled aside the seniors that he thought might be going to graduate school, and he asked us to teach the class one day. It was a great experience for the most part. It was in my Romantics class, and we each had to teach from Wordsworth’s “The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind.”
If you have been in my classes, you know that, although I do love a bit of Wordsworth, I mostly teach fiction, and most of the fiction I teach is American literature or Queer. So teaching a book of this lengthy and dense poem was not my favorite. Still, the opportunity to stand in front of my peers and cut my teeth in the classroom was important for me as I tried to decide what I wanted to do with my life.
Fast forward more years than I care to name, and I began thinking about what we offer to seniors in the English and Communication Department. I was at a conference this last week to present some of my research, and there I listened to several presentations specifically about pedagogy. One such paper reminded me of this formative experience from college, and I quickly grabbed my phone.
Kai Yakimenka is a senior English major who has taken maybe half a dozen classes with me. I know him well, and he is in Senior Seminar this semester, as well as my class in which we are currently reading Flanner O’Connor works. I remembered that this week we were discussing, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.”
In a Queer Lit Class in which I asked students to bring in examples they wanted the rest of the class to read, Kai had brought in this story. And he had written about it. So I shot a quick text to Kai, essentially asking if he wanted to be a guinea pig, if he wanted to teach that story to our class this week.
What followed was, I have to say, nothing short of miraculous. Kai and I texted back and forth about how this might work, he jumped at the chance, and, on Monday afternoon Kai taught my class.
He was brilliant. More importantly, his classmates were supportive, engaged, and fantastic. It was one of my favorite classes this year.
If you know me, you know that I have now run up and down the hall talking to my colleagues about doing this more, and I have told students in all of my classes about a standing offer to teach one of my classes if they are seniors and have a sense that this vocation might be for them.
As for Kai, his response was what I had hoped for. I texted him after class: “You were great. You seemed right at home. Did it seem fun?”
His response was what this vocation is all about: “It really did! It somehow felt natural. . . . . I’m so excited to be doing more of this in the future!”
And that, friends, is why we are here. Connecting. Listening and learning from each other. And imagining who we want to be in this world. It was such an honor to sit back and watch this part of Kai’s journey.
