Acting like a teacher

The appointed hour arrives. The audience is seated facing the front of the room, poised in various postures of anticipation. A solo performer arrives, and the room goes silent. She begins with a few introductory remarks, choosing her words with care, feeling the apprehension that comes with galvanizing a room’s attention for an hour. Or two. Thus begins a lecture on Emily Bronte. Or organic chemistry. Whatever the particular subject, the structure is time honored: the class sits in rows, facing the teacher, who (if he or she is any good) devotes substantial energy to the project of transmitting information in a manner that will stay in students’ minds, illustrating why the knowledge is worth knowing—all the while trying not to die out there. On the day I teach a class, no matter how arduously I try to overcome it, a static buzz of nerves and anxiety courses continually beneath the surface of things. I teach writing, a topic with which I have considerable familiarity and experience, but none of that matters. What I know is that I will in a matter of hours face my audience, a group of people looking at me, and waiting to hear what I am going to say. I have a general script, but can’t be completely sure what will come out of my mouth. Ironically enough, I wrestle with stage fright. The traditional educational classroom arrangement has been developed, one would assume, through pragmatism: an elder or sanctioned expert transmits data to those who wish, or have been conscribed, to learn. Arrange people in rows, and they can see the front of the room better than if they were strewn about. Seeing and hearing work together in concert, as they do. And this returns to the primal theatrical behavior pattern that is an intrinsic part of our make-up. We used to gather around fires because, in that arrangement, more people got more warmth. Once we’re in an indoor heated space, we tend to get into orderly lines and face front, ready to receive. Exceptions, of course, are theater in the round, and the circle style of classroom seating. Until one becomes accustomed to either, generally speaking, the average person hates them. (I don’t have science to back me up here, just the pained expressions of inexperienced theatergoers across the room from me in various round houses.) Humans like to duck into a crowd, lay low, and listen and watch (except for those, of course, who crave to be out in front—you know who you are). But there’s more going on here than the physical arrangement. Education and the theater, in our society, are both buffeted by the sort of tensions between the private and public spheres that fall along familiar lines of tribal fragmentation. The same political absolutist who would abhor systemic public education would presumably not adore the smell of public funding for the arts. And believers in common social and political ends would surely see the value in public funding for both. They’re similar beasts, the stage and the classroom, once you strip away the particulars. Either can be deadly boring, wrong-headed, didactic, and small. When they work, they make us more noble—and if that doesn’t sound like a worthy goal, we are really, truly not speaking the same language. Being in the audience, or the classroom, freaks some people out. And the reasons are probably on the same broad continuum. It’s a mix of response to authority, alienation, craving for inclusion, curiosity, fear, aspiration, and then that lucky feeling when one stumbles onto a really fucking groovy show. And when I have my day of stage fright, more than a dozen times a year, I do take some solace in the realization that this experience helps me empathize with, and perhaps understand more, the theater professionals about whom I write in other sectors of my professional life. This helps me for, say, a couple of minutes. Then it’s back to looking for something else to distract me. Having trod the Earth for four decades, I’ve worked through wave after wave of fear and doubt. But knowing I face a two-hour class, I get all sorts of involuntary input from various psycho-physical systems: intermittently shaky hands, the dread dead end of anxiety, the spurts of disproportionate irrationality, and, yeah, the heebie-jeebies. And how I am relieved, and exhausted, when (far more often than not) it goes really well.