“Oh!” the young man gasped, pressing a slightly-shaking hand to his chest as I turned the corner. “I thought that was a snake!” I stared at him for a couple of heartbeats, nonplussed. Then recognition hit and I laughed, looking down at my bike, which I’d been walking briskly down the hall perpendicular to his corridor. Briskly enough, it seems, that its clinking chain mimicked uncannily the warning rattle of one of Texas’ ten rattlesnake species. 

There wasn’t a snake in the hallway that day, but I’ve felt enough terror this semester to suppose there was. “Teaching is horrifying,” as even my pedagogy professor admits. Hear, hear. “It does get better,” she adds. The jury’s still out on that one. My cozy routines of graduate school have been usurped by a decidedly uncozy routine centered on teaching an 8 to 9:20 a.m. class every Tuesday and Thursday. This is the first time since childhood I’ve been able to remember my dreams—all nightmares, lately. One Monday night in the fourth week of classes, I didn’t have any nightmares. It sounds like progress until you learn it was because I didn’t sleep at all. By Thursday morning, I had added NyQuil to the list of things I’m grateful for. 

I arrive in the inherently intimidating room about an hour early, because nothing gets the blood pumping like that empty, horrifyingly enormous coliseum of a lecture hall, where the students’ seats and benches tower above me in the dimly lit pit. There’s little else down there except the lectern with its computer screen stuttering spastically in an apt reflection of my mind as the first students trickle in. “Hi!” I barely rasp out as each one enters. I’m greeted, almost universally, with silence—which is fair, as my voice rises scarcely above noiselessness and can’t possibly reach the doors far above. There’s also a mysterious humming box that glows blue until I shut it off to hear myself think—I don’t know what it is, but sometimes I forget to turn it back on and wonder if that’s ruining something. And, of course, there’s my bike, because it accompanies me everywhere—funny story. 

Walking my bike down the hallway is an admittedly eccentric activity, with the corridors filled to the brim with in-person learners again, but I can’t very well store it in my office as usual—five weeks into the semester, I have yet to receive a key.* And that, I suspect, is the heart of it: I don’t feel prepared for this latest, steepest learning curve, keeping barely a breath ahead of my students, locked out of my office, having only scrounged up a copy of the textbook after the semester had begun. 

I desperately wish I could be a better teacher—for the sake of both my sanity and my students, who are really wonderful people, and only (inexplicably) terrifying in the mass. The pervasive fear of speaking is 100 percent irrational, but this knowledge has not yet allowed me to shake the dread. I exaggerated a few paragraphs ago when I implied I conduct two hour-and-twenty-minutes-long lessons each week. While that’s what the schedule suggests, I’ve only managed to fill the entire interminable period once in nine lessons. I’m certainly no Professor Lupin; I’m terribly afraid I’m more of a Professor Binns—in (lack of) style, if not long-windedness. 

What would it take, I wonder in my most nightmarish middle-of-the-night-too-late-to-sleep-now moments, for this leaden responsibility to be lifted from my shoulders? A bite from a rattlesnake might do it—for a lesson or two. Shame there don’t seem to be any around here… just the inadvertent illusion thanks to a harried graduate student eccentrically walking her bike. 

*I gratefully picked up a shiny brass key on Thursday, September 23 (only thirty-two days into the longest semester of my life). It didn’t calm the dread but may have allayed the fear of rattlesnakes in my fellow academics—another thing to be grateful for. 

Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth

Natasha (Strydhorst) Unsworth (‘16) is a science communication researcher and practitioner working on her Ph.D. at Texas Tech University. Natasha hails from Calgary, Alberta. Some of her favo(u)rite authors are C. S. Lewis, Francis Collins, and Bill Bryson. Her favourite earthly place is the Canadian Rocky Mountains, and her favourite activities are reading and enjoying the great outdoors—preferably simultaneously.