Essay 3 sample

On my first day teaching at BRCC, it was raining. It was raining hard.
I stood outside the building that housed my first class, watching students file in and out, covering their heads with newspapers and notebooks, hoping to hold off the downpour. With each group that wandered in the door, I wondered whether they might be walking into my class.
I had been teaching for three years, but this was my first day on this new campus, in a different city, with different expectations. Although I was experienced, I still felt like a newbie. My stomach knotted itself into a ball on every first day as I wondered whether I would be able to convey the complicated combination of authority and assholery that my teaching mentors had said were necessary for garnering student respect. I was small and looked like a student myself - a friendly, bouncy student. I didn’t look down my nose at my class, didn’t want to shout or pretend to be stern on the first day. I wanted, secretly, to have fun with them. But that wasn’t what my mentors had suggested, and I was worried how my personality would go over with this new group of kids.
In order to hold back my nerves, I texted my best friend in California, also a teacher. “I can’t believe it’s raining,” I texted. “On my first. fucking. day.”
“So go in soaked,” she texted back. “They’ll get a laugh and it’ll distract everybody from feeling nervous.”
A laugh? But I wasn’t supposed to get a laugh! I was supposed to go in the door stone-faced and serious.
I sighed and leaned against a nearby brick column, preparing my response.
The column wasn’t as close as I thought it would be. I leaned a little further. I leaned a little further, distracted by my phone and my nerves and the rain.
And then I fell.
Alongside the entrance to the building were a series of giant bushes - the kind that only manage to grow in hot South Louisiana climates. They were tall and veiny, branches reaching out in every direction. And I had landed straight down in the midst of all these bushes.
My phone flew one direction, my laptop bag another, and me another. Frazzled and trying to fight off the rain, I reached for the edge of the building’s porch, where I had been standing just seconds before. My hand slipped. I reached out again, slipped again. Fine. Instead of pulling myself out, maybe I could crawl out of the bushes. I looked for an easy path out, crawling on my hands and knees and getting twigs stuck in my hair.
“Are you okay?”
I looked up to see what was clearly a student standing above me on the porch.
“Yes. Just a little - soaked. And stuck.”
“We can help you out.”
Two other students emerged from behind him. One of them reached down with a hand to pull me out of the snarled bushes, while the other two dug around for my bag and phone. As they handed my belongings to me, I tried to brush the twigs from my hair and clothes.
“Thanks.”
“No problem,” they said, laughing a little.
And with that we parted and turned to walk into the building. It only took me a few seconds to realize that we were all walking in the same direction. As I walked behind them, they turned and realized we were all about to walk into the same classroom - me to the front, them to the desks.
“That’s our teacher!” I heard one whisper.
Now I had no idea what to do. These were my students, and they had just seen me at my absolute worst - soaking wet and covered in twigs and scratches.
They sat at the back of the room, snickering but respectfully avoiding telling their fellow students about the incident. I could tell they wanted to, though.
“It’s okay,” I relented after a moment. “You can tell them.”
And with that, the boy who had offered me help first turned to the class and said, “We just dug her out of the bushes!”
He and his friends narrated the whole story, exaggerating my fall and my excavation. At first, I cringed. How were these kids ever going to respect me after this story?
As it turned out, they weren’t really worried about respect, or classroom dynamics. All they cared about was the story - and the story was funny. I had let them laugh at me. They knew I could mess up, could make mistakes.
On that day, those students became some of my favorites. We spend the entire semester feeling free to talk to one another. They asked more questions, talked more in class discussions, than any other group I’ve ever had. They proved my old mentors wrong: sometimes, being vulnerable is the best way to go.