My project for this summer is to work on some of my mannerisms. I have always appeared strange to people at first, and after many years came to grips with it for myself: without shame I can say with Lawrence, who may have been a fool, “It’s my manner, sir.” But I cannot say this to my students so easily. My effeminacy is sometimes too much; the strange intonations, delicate s-sounds, small and quick-moving wrists, swaying hips, and dancer’s gait (I did practice ballet for about twelve years) all add up to an insurmountable distraction to my students. So my goal is to try to tone all this down a little. I want to try to make myself a little less remarkable, so as to generate fewer remarks. There are enough reasons for my students to question my very presence in the Delta classroom without the added questions, prejudices, and worries that come up around effeminacy.
But is that merely about image? How shallow and vain! No?
No. There is nothing merely about image in the classroom. Image counts for so much. A teacher cannot expect his students to know him intimately—“for what can one know even of the people one lives with every day?” But the lack of any deep knowledge does not prevent us from forming a relationship. This is the simplest way I can put it: when a one cannot relate to another, one relates to the idea of another. Very few of my students “get” me, see me, know me, but they each have an idea of me that is generated from appearances, from image as it is played out in discrete interactions we have day after day. The tone of the voice, the posture, the Walmart dress shirt, the effeminate mannerisms, the knowledge of Greek with its funny letters (which could be any language for all they know), the skinny arms. From this, for weeks, even months, some of my kids were sure they were under the tutelage of an absentminded, aged, poor, homosexual, Muslim vegetarian. Absentminded and poor are true enough, though it would not hurt to try to hide those a little bit, but the others are just not me. I can easily see now why my kids would sometimes treat me like a—whatever. So changing the image changes the idea, changes the basis of a superficial relationship.
The biggest things are my voice and my gait. For my voice, I am not going to try to speak an octave lower, but I am going to avoid certain phrases and words that catch effeminacy particularly well. For my gait—I have been at a loss for years—I think I just need to walk sideways to fix this one...
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