How can I be surprised by the same things over and over? You would think after a decade of this sort of thing (grad school and faculty time lumped together as "teaching time") it would be harder to drop my jaw. Still, at the start of each new semester, I am amazed at how tired I am. More, that the tired seems to come not from new prep or updating or new students, but from the effort of performing.
I don't dare ease up though. By my third semester, I realized that I have maybe two weeks' time to hook a class. If you don't come out of the gate strong, you never fully grab the class and it is like dying slowly on stage for sixteen weeks.
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Performativity sounds like a social science neologism, as with problematize or complexify. Anyway, I am exhausted after I teach. I usually need a beer, then another, then another. It is like you are the screenwriter, director, actor, editor, and publisher all rolled into one nice little 90 minute package. Just like a movie! And people tell me "you must have the best job on earth- all you have to do is stand up and yak for an hour." Right.
Ah yes. Those people would be the same asshats who, when you tell them you teach two courses per term, say "wish I only had to work six hours a week!"
Right with you on the one-man-band aspect of teaching. One summer term I taught two sections of same course, back to back in the same room. It was bizarre, hearing myself do the same pacing, same examples, same jokes. Made me so self-conscious that the 'performance' aspect of it started being obvious. I still think of that as the Bad Sociological Dinner Theater Summer.
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