"Imposter"

I would like to take this time to offer my sincerest apologies

to my first students – Freshmen English, 1997.

I was a fraud.

Sure I had read lots of books

and didn’t embarrass myself in graduate school.

But your adolescent posturing,

your theatrical sighs, missing verb exercises,

and varied attempts at coolness

mystified and paralyzed me.

I was staying one chapter ahead of you,

hoping for questions I knew the answers to.

I worked with cagey, gray-haired veteran teachers

who knew, as if by smell,

when to enforce the syllabus’s lateness policy

and when a boy’s eyes made the syllabus irrelevant.

Was I really not supposed to smile until Christmas?

Had I just signed a contract for $26,000 a year

to be miserable, or worse, to feign misery

even when I saw the occasional flicker of your understanding,

like houselights going on and off during a storm.

It’s easy for me now to answer the alarm,

tie my tie, carry my props with me

in this play I’ve grown to love

whose blocking and script never stay the same.

But to you, my first students,

so patient with my sad attempts at authority,

I say, “I’m sorry.”

I went into this job

thinking Beowulf and Hamlet

would be really hard to teach.

The truth is that any one of you

with untied shoes and questionable hygiene

is infinitely more complicated and mysterious

than anyone in any book

any English class has ever read.

I know this now.

You taught it to me.