Today is the first day of the Spring 2013 semester. I am feeling both excited and nervous, and had some difficulty falling asleep last night. I believe this is a good sign.
Years ago, when I first began teaching, I was always nervous and excited on the first day. That nervousness prompted me to think deeply about the purpose of teaching philosophy to my students, to anticipate the questions my students may have, and to formulate responses ahead of time. The nervousness prompted me to make creative plans, and engage in a critical re-examination of my beliefs about both philosophy and teaching. With these reflections fresh in my mind, I was able to speak and react more dynamically in class, and have fresher, more authentic insights and answers for my students’ comments. Over the past two years, as my passion for teaching was overridden by duties and obligations, my mind increasingly depended upon memories of answers I had already formulated. Whether or not my students saw it, I felt more and more that my teaching had become stale, and that I was losing my ability to teach an excellent class and tackle difficult texts.
But one of the principal goals of philosophy is the art of critically demolishing old thoughts in one’s mind: to deconstruct, re-examine, and re-build answers to old problems. The problems of teaching are problems that I worked hard to answer a few years ago, but that doesn’t mean my work is done. It doesn’t mean that I can depend on my old answers to move forward. Rather, in order to be an effective teacher of philosophy, I must rethink and rebuild everything from scratch.
The nervousness and excitement that I felt last night, that I feel right now, and that has been building over the past week has enabled me to do that. At this point of the fall semester, my mind was occupied with being the department chair. At this point last summer semester, my mind was occupied with my final tenure application. At this point of spring 2012 and fall 2011, my mind was occupied with the graduate classes I was taking. Today, my mind is totally occupied with Confucius, Descartes, Galileo, and my anticipations of how my students will react to these three thinkers and the various projects of my courses in Ethics, the Enlightenment, and my “Great Books” game class.
Let’s get this semester started.
Natural Causes 