Not so easy start

Ok. Here's my new life. I'm a graduate student – a PhD candidate – in mathematics education. I get the opportunity to teach at the college level while taking classes. In my opinion, it's the best of all possibilities. I get to be a student, which I love. And I get to return to teaching; although it is at the post secondary level, so my save the children desires aren't all being fulfilled.

My first night of my own classes and I'm feeling like a fraud. We're going over concepts that we covered at the undergraduate level, so the instructor is going ninety miles an hour. And everyone else is answering her questions without hesitation. And I'm drowning in self doubt.

As she's writing those symbols on the board, I recall what they mean. The upside down A means “for all” and the backwards E means “an element of”. Yeah, I get that. And I know the meaning of a ring and closure and the identity property. But none of it is coming together for me. And I can feel myself panicking. I just know that she can see that I'm an idiot whom they shouldn't have let into the program.

I think about my students and how this might compare to how they feel. When I taught middle school, they were seeing the concepts for the first time. So when they didn't get it, I presumed that it was like learning a foreign language, and that they had to decipher the meaning. But my current students are now seeing this material at least for the second time. So it's not so foreign, but somehow still undecipherable.

I'm sitting here in this class thinking I should know this. I studied this material as a junior at a tier one university, and I'm pretty sure I got an A in the class. I know that I've seen all of this before just like everyone else. But I couldn't spout out any of it. And I'm feeling unsure that I could prove any of the things that I'm expected to know already. So while she's up there saying that it's obvious that this set is abeliean since it has left blah blah blah, I'm fighting the urge to burst into tears and run out of the room like a teenage drama queen.

I tried relaying to my husband what it felt like. The best I could come up with was a comparison to the scene in Dances with Wolves when Stand with Fist is told the remember the white man's words and she can't because it's too painful. Or it was like when a kindergardener learns to read by phonics. They can sound out the words syllable by syllable, but they can't tell you what happened in the paragraph they just read.

I tried consoling myself by believing that this will help me to develop empathy for my students. But I want to be the smart kid that I used to be. I don't mind working towards understanding, but I don't want to feel like I'm on the brink of failure clawing my way to safety.

This isn't as fun as I thought it would be.