Graduation comes so fast we don't have time for pretending

In "Mother Night," Kurt Vonnegut wrote: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." I might add: "And for how long." I was invited to join a small group of students last week to celebrate the completion of their undergraduate degrees. We first met four years ago, and I remember the moment vividly. It was my first day as a full-time instructor at an elite business school and they were freshmen in their first week of classes.  Heading into the fourth lecture of that first day, I wasn't convinced I had made the right decision to leave a lucrative private sector career to teach. I didn't know how the technology in the classroom worked. I didn't know I could move the furniture around any way I wanted. I was so consumed with my own ignorance that I hadn't even considered the far more unsettled condition of these young people. They expected me to be brilliant, to be a source of stability in the middle of the chaos of their first week of college. I wasn't brilliant. I was pretending. And I wasn't pretending very well. The first three classes that day were filled with students who were nervously silent. My own nervousness didn't help. But when I entered that last class of the day, the students were talking and laughing with each other like they were old friends, hardly noticing that the evil professor had arrived. One of them made eye contact with me and I asked, "What, did all of you go to high school together?" She looked at me curiously, seemingly wondering if I had forgotten that it was the first day of school, and said, "uh, we just met." That moment changed everything for me. Four years later, the first days of my semesters are wildly different. I am a little evil, but not accidentally. I am a little anxious, but only because I know the fun that lies ahead. I'm more than a little curious about my new students. I'm truly fascinated by them. And that curiosity is everything. I teach speech and writing to students who didn't go to college to learn either. They can all follow instruction on rhetoric and persuasiveness, and they all know what a complete sentence is. Teaching that stuff has become the easy part. The real challenge is helping them find their voice.   Connect with Michael Leppert Visit michaelleppert.com to read the full post and links to any resources or articles mentioned. Twitter @michaelleppert  Facebook at Michael Leppert Michael Leppert is an author, educator and a communication consultant in Indianapolis. He writes about government, politics and culture at MichaelLeppert.com. The views and opinions expressed are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Indiana Citizen or any other affiliated organization.