ABSTRACT
It has come time for the confession: I am a teacher.1 For my entire professional life I have never been anything but a teacher. I have stood in thousands of classrooms during my 25 years in the profession. I have gazed upon the faces and been gazed upon by the faces of thousands of students. I stand several times daily with my hand on the doorknob to a classroom, and several times daily I experience terror. Standing at the entrance way (‘Abandon home all Ye who enter here’ Dante posts above the gate of hell) I think of J. Alfred Prufrock who declared that ‘there will be time/To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;/There will be time to murder and create…’ I, to the contrary, have never had enough time, though I do ponder with Prufrock, ‘And should I then presume?/And how should I begin?’ Yet despite the fact that, unlike Prufrock, I have heard the mermaids singing even to me, and unlike the reserved Prufrock, I am at home in school, I acknowledge that I have rarely engaged in a classroom as a teacher in which I did not feel first very frightened and in which I did not experience a radical estrangement. Even now, after all these years, I stand at the door of the classroom and as I enter the room I sense my breathing unnaturally quicken and my heart beat rather wildly. In such moments I cannot but be reminded of Edgar Allen Poe’s (1967) horror tale The Tell-Tale Heart. Believing he has rid himself of the old man’s gaze by stilling his heart, the story’s narrator, experiencing the growing terror at the perceptible beating of the heart but trying desperately to deny its sound, remarks, ‘No doubt I now grew very pale;—but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased-and what could I do?… I gasped for breath’ (1967, p. 448). Hiding his terror behind a facade of rationalism, the narrator vainly attempts to mislead the investigators. I push open the door to my classroom and I, too, reveal the tell-tale heart. Like the unnamed protagonist in the story I, too, must ultimately acknowledge my humanity.
