Elaine Showalter goes into great detail on the many anxieties of teaching. As teachers, we may see these anxieties as a hinderance and as something that we can and should overcome. She also gives us plenty of tools and suggestions to alleviate our anxiety in the classroom. We can reduce anxiety through improving teaching skills, reducing isolation, limiting the amount of material we cover, allowing our personalities to shine through and looking at grades and evaluations as tools for improvement. All of her suggestions help us grow as educators by focusing on the seven causes of our anxiety.
I agree that we should know the causes of our anxiety and that we should work to try and improve our skills so that we feel more confident in the classroom during future lectures. However, I feel that we should not be afraid of our anxieties. Instead, we should embrace our worries and fears as something that pushes us to do better. Once we have found comfort in our teaching and our work, we have settled into complacency. This does not fit well with the evolutionary and adaptive nature of our profession. I posit that our anxiety, when dealt with properly, leads to our continued success in an every changing work environment.
Showalter’s first chapter reminded me of a New York Times article from 2011 on the benefits of worry. Many studies have been published with the opposite opinion, but Robert Frank’s article „Why Worry? It’s Good for You“ brings new insight to the discussion of anxiety. He references Charles Darwin who suggests „Anxiety, hunger, fatigue, loneliness, thirst, anger and fear spur action to meet the competitive challenges we face.“ All of these negative aspects eventually drive us to improve. Having taught a lecture 100 times, one might think it silly to worry about teaching it the 101st time. One could worry about the lecture and prepare through review and rehearsal. In the end, if the lecture goes well, one might say it was silly to have worried. But had the instructor not worried, it is likely that the lecture would not have gone as smoothly. Often times we look at our successes in hindsight and think that we should not have worried because everything worked out. But had we not worried about our successes, we might not have been driven to succeed.
Anxiety is then the force which causes us to work harder to succeed. It is an evolutionary tactic to motivate us to adapt to new situations. Anxiety is one of humanity’s primitive responses to a stressor and triggers the flight or fight response, which can harm or help us depending on the actions we take. In this sense, it is not the anxiety with which we should concern ourselves, rather it is our response to anxiety we need to improve. This is how Showalter’s suggestions on how to alleviate anxiety help us improve our teaching skills. Anxiety is something that we should not turn away from. We should embrace our anxiety as something that, when responded to properly, will lead us to greater heights in our profession and we can use Showalters tips to guide us in addressing that anxiety.
