My First Day

Maybe I should have been nervous, but I wasn’t. To be honest, teaching my first class at Monterey Peninsula College felt like coming home. My wife works there as well, and we drove in together. She snapped a couple of pictures of me outside my class, and then she went off to work and I waited for my students to arrive.

I attended MPC as a student for some years and got my AA there. I knew these classrooms and buildings. I had friends in every corner of the campus. When students began to pour into my classroom, they didn’t feel like strangers, although I knew none of them. They felt very familiar: I had sat beside their like and been one of them not so very long ago. There were kids fresh from high school (or even in high school doing Independent Study), older students returning to school looking to begin a new career, and people coming off of night jobs to attend my 8am class. There were nursing students and football players and kids from the tough side of town, and as they filed in I welcomed them all. These were my people.

I had been warned my lecture would go over their heads. Frankly, I think some of it did, but I never saw anyone check his watch or glance at her phone (though I forbade compulsive phone-checking right away)– more importantly I never saw a glazed over eye. Even if they didn’t completely understand every word, they were interested. They were present. I reviewed my syllabus, delivered my brief lecture, assigned an in-class reading, and then we discussed it briefly. This was an English class, just below transfer level, and even on the first day I wanted to get them thinking about what that would mean. At the end of the class, I gave them a writing prompt that had to do with our reading (Julio Cortázar’s “House Taken Over“). They filed out.

The next class is on Wednesday. I can’t wait.