quick confession

 Am I allowed to admit that I don't have a passion for teaching students that don't care? 

Nothing gets my imposter syndrome rollicking like teaching. I did not dream of being a teacher. I was an intensely shy child, and though I loved learning, I never wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to write and research and think, and at some point along the way I accepted that teaching would be part of it. The more I've taught, the more comfortable and confident I've become as a teacher, but I guess even I have a limit. 

Has teaching changed? Have students changed? Were my professors just as annoyed by students who were totally unengaged? Was I just oblivious to the slackers around me?

The irony is that the only way humanities as a discipline is barely surviving is through general education classes, but then we are just stuck teaching students who don't care. And then the burden of teaching becomes making them care--and I feel like confessing daily that I don't have that skill. I am not inspiring. I am not the person who people follow. I am not the English teacher that people name in their acceptance speeches. And yet, I'm trying so hard. I made the theme pop culture, and I chose a fantasy novel for our common read, and I let them choose some of the pop culture that we look at. I try to incorporate discussion and activities and provide reasoning for why we are doing things. None of which were ever part of my college English classes. And yet--I honestly dread going to class because there's so little response or interest to what I put out there. Everything feels so one-sided, and there's no energy except my own to build momentum. It feels like I have to make every class a game or something just to get them to engage. 

And I know it's not personal. They have other things going on in their lives. They are tired from playing in the football game yesterday. They don't really care whether they get better at writing no matter how hard I try to talk about it in practical terms. Maybe school has always been hard for them, and they're just tired of it being so hard. There are so many other more interesting things to engage with in the world that even talking about them seems boring and pointless. 

So my confession is not really about resenting the students (though it's hard not to suspect that the expectations have fallen too low), it's more about admitting that I don't really like this and don't want to do it. For me, teaching becomes fun when it feels like we're really having a conversation. When you see students working through the ideas and getting joy from the texts you've assigned. But all the joy can't come from me. And it feels like we've just entered an era where this is the baseline and teaching has suddenly turned into something else, something that I am really not very good at. Am I just being naive? Is it just a particularly bad semester since I'm teaching a basic skills class? Does it just suck to have to do something you're not particularly good at?