Blog
Teaching and intimacy 2
When I was teaching as a professor of Art History my lectures had an air of spontaneity in the way I departed from my notes and responded to an art work that I was showing or to an idea that suddenly popped into my head or to a student’s question. My mind spiraled in enthusiasm. The creative freshness of spontaneity excites me, and spontaneity allowed both for the flourishing of my passion for teaching and for thinking out loud in a classroom.
Spontaneity is essential to intimacy. Sticking with a syllabus interrupted intimacy, and though I felt for many years what I called “professorial guilt” when I proceeded more and more slowly, which was more and more spontaneously, through a syllabus, I did my best to free myself. Guilt is a rare feeling for me, so experiencing it as part of teaching, which I love, produced a suffering Joanna. When I pushed to try and cover all the material on a syllabus, my body “rewarded” me with anxiety. I was doing what I didn’t want to do.
Every once in a while I’d tease myself about professorial guilt in front of a class, and we’d laugh. Delicious spontaneity then, and as I let myself become more and more intimate. Which also led to my being more and more dubious about remaining an instructor within academia.
Spontaneity and intimacy–for me, the classroom confined them. (I felt much more roominess teaching studio courses in performance art than teaching academics.) Spontaneity and intimacy–ultimately they helped me fly from the ivory tower. In actuality, I retired from a teaching position at the University of Nevada, Reno, and in a larger actuality, my flight, continuing today, was precise but to nowhere in particular, which is the place, position, space, or condition in which vision becomes more panoramic.
