Free Writing Is My Drink by Theo Pauline Nestor

group. Ex-
    cept for the occasional gripe, they were happy enough. A few
    people had things to say about my hair and shoes. But there was
    one evaluation that jumped from the pile. “Let go of the cards,”
    the young evaluator wrote in loopy cursive. “You know this stuff.
    You just have to trust yourself. Just put down the cards and tell us what you know. You’ll do great. I promise!!!”
    Let go of the cards. I felt so naked, so revealed. It began to occur to me that every job has an unspoken emotional requirement that, while never listed among the qualifications in any
    job description, is just as vital to one’s success as those that are.
    Doctors have to be able to cope with facing the grief of others;
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    T h e o P a u l i n e N e s t o r
    lawyers have to be willing to assert themselves even when they
    don’t feel like it; and teachers have to feel the exposure of all eyes on them, of being the starting spot for everything in the room.
    Writers have to make themselves vulnerable by sharing their
    opinions. You can be a genius and still not be up for teaching if
    the emotional requirements of the job—including the ability to
    handle this exposure—are beyond your reach.
    The next quarter I began to loosen my grip on the cards a
    little. One thing I noticed about the cards was they made me feel
    like crap. Life with the cards involved me following a very loose
    script instructing me on how to impersonate B., a person who
    cared about a different set of things than I cared about, which
    is easy for me to say now. But mostly, back then, the cards re-
    minded me of all I felt I should know if I were ever going to be
    half the teacher I imagined B. had been.
    Occasional y, I found myself putting the cards aside, and
    then I’d tell a little story about when I was in college, about how I felt afraid and unprepared most of the time. I’d blush as I told
    these stories, but I noticed that when I did, the students would
    actual y begin to wake up, and sometimes they’d laugh and
    sometimes they’d even tell stories about themselves, about their
    experiences in the classroom. The note cards gradual y fell into
    disuse as I brought in research about learning that I had done
    myself, but a large part of the class became stories: stories of
    barely getting by, stories of succeeding unexpectedly, stories of
    finding your passion and the topics you can learn without strain.
    Even though I still wanted to prove to my students, my fel-
    low faculty, and myself that I was as a real academic, that I was
    as hard-core as B., the truth—revealing itself in the classroom as
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    W r i t i n g i s M y D r i n k
    gravity reveals itself in every object that fal s—was that I am not truly of the academy. My strength does not lie in the rigors of
    research or in the dogged pursuit of knowledge or information.
    The truth, which I still wanted to deny, is that I am far too erratic and sil y to be a true academic. But it was also dawning on me
    that this might actual y make me more suited for the job at hand, and that a true academic might not be interested in working for
    long in this particular trench of higher education. Case in point:
    B. was gone.
    I also began to realize that I shared a special bond with the
    majority of my students in rural Utah: We doubted our own
    smarts. Most of my students’ parents hadn’t gone to college.
    This, the department head told me, made them “high risk” for
    not completing their own college degrees. I nodded. This made
    sense and made me want to help them. Why didn’t it occur to
    me then that neither my mother nor my biological father had
    finished high school? I could understand what “high risk” meant
    in terms of my students, but I had never been able to see myself
    as falling short for any reason other than my own failings.
    As my first year of teaching came to a