performance anxiety: TA-ing

It’s another beginning of sorts, I guess; only I think I’ve kicked it off to a bad start. Even when I think about attempting to sum up my absence from the blogosphere I always find it difficult to get back into the groove of writing once I’ve let the weeks pass by. Wasn’t blogging for 15 minutes a day supposed to help my writing addiction?

In other news, I had my first presentation on an Old English poem in front of 85 students. Of course, I was fretting all morning and tried not to get too caffeinated all at once, but still got a bellyache nonetheless. I got up to the podium, read the first 4-5 lines aloud, and went over some context about Anglo-Saxon warrior culture. I don’t know exactly what was running through my head as I read aloud, but I was ecstatic that my voice was actually loud enough; and at some point, I also thought, “eh, they probably don’t know a thing about Beowulf anyway.” So I projected my voice and even made eye contact a few times—thank goodness I actually typed out a little script of basically what I wanted to cover. Word from prof was that I didn’t look nervous at all. Sweet. Still, it was definitely a bizarre experience. Did I enjoy it? Not sure. Even as I try to recollect what it was like to be in a position of authority, I still feel really ambivalent about the whole thing. I discovered later that afternoon that the students were actually seniors, and are quite familiar read with most of the material on the syllabus. So much for trying to calm myself for next presentation. But I was pleased how it turned out, especially since I got performance anxiety the night before the presentation and imagined exiting the room in the middle of my mini-lecture, just like the way I had imagined walking out of my dreaded piano recital all those years ago. I’m still learning a lot from prof, of course. Just gotta try to be stoked about the reading material somehow. I can’t believe I’m around seniors.