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The respectable cult
A new book asks why Christian Science has gotten away with the kind of paranoid, secretive practices that usually push religions into the kook bin.
By Laura Miller
[09/01/99]

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"Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash"
A close look at garbage comes up with gold.
By Peter Kurth
[09/01/99]

America the brutal
In his follow-up to "Angela's Ashes" Frank McCourt confronts the indignities of immigrant life.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[08/31/99]

The suffering Irish
What will Erin's literary artists write about now that their motherland has found its pot of gold?
By Daniel Reitz
[08/31/99]

Reviews
"Backbeat: Earl Palmer's Story"
An account of one of rock 'n' roll's legendary drummers doesn't go deep enough.
By Greg Villepique
[08/31/99]

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Teaching anxiety, like corn, tomatoes and zucchini, is at its peak across the land in August. It is more than dread of the new academic year, more than the realization that a summer of research and relaxation is over. It is the fear felt by professors old and young that they cannot teach, and that this time they will be found out. Some never experience the anxiety, some just claim they don't. Some have it only at the beginning of their careers. Some, no matter how distinguished, suffer throughout their working lives.

I discovered the seasonal aspect of teaching anxiety 13 years ago. I'd already taught for several years, on the whole successfully. Now, as a new Ph.D. in Classics, I was about to start my first tenure-track job. Everything was great until August. That's when I began tempting my friends to homicide, insisting that because I had taught only Latin before, I didn't know enough to teach beginning ancient Greek -- even though I had just finished a dissertation on a Greek author, and had been hired partly on the strength of my Greek and on my successful teaching experience. I didn't add that I had convinced myself that my inability to teach meant that I'd have to spend all my time preparing for class, hence would never publish, hence would be fired. Nor did I share with them the nightmares in which nameless students laughed and pointed.

Surprise: At the end of the first semester, none of my students' evaluations read worse than "Less 'sink or swim' attitude, please." No one found me out (it being difficult to find out something that isn't true), I had time to extract one article from my dissertation and they didn't fire me.

So I thought that my fear was just part of being a novice. Then, the next August, a friend with an international reputation and 25 years of teaching experience called me to announce that he absolutely could not take up the prestigious appointment he had been offered (and had accepted). Why? He was unable to conjugate off the top of his head a common but highly irregular Greek verb, and fear of being caught was keeping him up nights.

Once I learned that other, older colleagues had teaching anxiety too, I began to see it everywhere. I noticed that a friend in another department, a winner of national teaching awards, grew unnaturally pale and silent during the weeks before classes, when he spent as much time in the men's room as he did preparing lectures.

With collusion from pitying students and colleagues, both men fooled themselves into thinking they were good teachers and scholars. Every August, their track records of publications and years of positive student evaluations suddenly seemed a sham, a mirage, a barely opaque veneer over something far worse than emptiness: delusion.

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