Cold Feet

Winter session begins tomorrow. The group of students I will teach this semester will be my fifth; still I have an overwhelming anxiety about the first day of school. Really, this is preposterous: thirteen years of public school, eight semesters of undergrad, and nine semesters of graduate school should compound with these five terms to make the first day a breeze. And still I get cold feet.

So I sent out an announcement to let my winter students know that our classroom has moved. "I look forward to seeing you tomorrow!" I lied. Really, I don't look forward to it at all—not only do I love the freedom of sleeping until noon, but I harbor an irrational fear of the eleven unknown names on my roster.

That's what it is: the fear of the unknown. What if the roster is brimmed with eleven illiterates? Eleven degenerates? Eleven felons? (Still, I've taught worse.)

Then I checked my email and saw that I had a response from one of my winter students. "Hi! My name is Lu," she wrote. "Thank you for letting us know. I am glad to see you tomorrow, too."

And suddenly starting over doesn't seem so bad.