Half of the MFA students are placed in charge of their own classrooms in support of a series of lectures given by a professor, the other half shadow different professors in their classrooms. Learning to teach is the main reason that I wanted to get my MFA, so I’m ecstatic and terrified to be one of the MFA students with my own classroom. All of my life, following the leader has been my biological imperative. In addition to navigating physical geography by playing a covert game of “follow the leader,” I have also always watched and taken cues from my teachers and professors. The women who were my college professors were my guides to how a woman can be smart and funny and curious about the world and be completely, unapologetically, herself. Now, for the first time in my life, I’m expected to lead. My introduction-to-writing students are surly from the start, though I don’t blame them for their lack of enthusiasm for five-paragraph essay structure. Every Tuesday, the professor for this undergraduate course lectures on a different period of avant-garde art history, beginning with the futurists and ending with the conceptual artists of the late twentieth century.
