Early on in my teaching career at San Jose State, I was observed by a professor for my departmental evaluation. He was a poet. I forget his name. And his poetry, but that may be out of bitterness on my part. I was teaching English 1A or 1B, and I was over my head. The day he sat in the back and watched me and took notes, I talked out of my ass about argument. I knew character and setting and plot (sort of), but there I was teaching a whole semester worth of argumentative strategies because my resume had made it look like I should know how to do this.

One time I tried to climb the cliffs that line the beaches between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay. I was scrabbling up to the top where our car was parked, and the cliff started to break. I froze as what I had thought was a solid surface slowly pulled apart in my hands.

That’s how I felt teaching argument in front of the poet, so I abruptly drew the lesson to a close and focused on handing back graded essays. I decided to shame the students to take the focus off my shitty teaching. I pulled out my red Bic pen. “This was full of ink when I started grading your papers,” I said. “Now it barely writes. You don’t proofread, and you hand in rough drafts, and then I have to use up all my ink marking your errors.”

What a dick.

My evaluation was not strong. In his office, the poet said to me, “But you’re not thinking of teaching as a career, right?” and I burst into tears.

I went to Carl's Jr and got a bacon double cheeseburger, fries, and a large Diet Coke and tried to drown my shame in food that could kill me.

I had tried and failed. And someone—not just someone—the poet AND the classroom full of students—had seen. The worst thing was I had to go BACK and face those kids and try to be better. WHILE THEY WATCHED ME.

I put the burger in front of my mouth and tried to suffocate myself while I was driving, but I instinctually chewed my way to safety, and two days later, there I was, an asshole with a dry erase and a lesson plan and thirty students who just wanted to understand how to construct an argument so they could pass the final exam.

I taught at San Jose State for over fifteen years. I got better, but it took a lot of work. Teaching is hard. There were so many gaps in my own education. I had to teach myself what prepositional phrases were, adverbs even—the embarrassing stuff I was supposed to know. It was shameful that I was teaching college-level writing, that I had a master’s degree in writing, and had no idea, really, what made a preposition and a prepositional phrase different.

There was so much to be ashamed about as a teacher. Every time I would leave the classroom, I would be washed with crappy feelings. I was too loud, too stupid, too silly. I shouldn’t have said that thing. I was letting the students down, not giving them the information they needed. They were being taught by a fraud.

This shame bath was a drag because it seemed to come out of nowhere. While I was in the classroom, everything was fine, great even sometimes. I was doing my best. The students were doing their best. They wrote amazing things. We laughed a lot. We just were who we were, no big deal.

I tried. I had a policy one year that if a student handed me an essay as a final draft and there was a single typo, the essay went back, ungraded. This was a failed experiment because it meant I had an enormous backlog of essays to grade as they came back to me, repaired.

I didn’t understand why the kids didn’t try harder. I didn’t understand why they weren’t as ashamed of typos as I was. To me, a typo was the same as walking out of the house with your fly open or a big piece of lettuce stuck between your front teeth. It was also a statement that your writing wasn’t a source of pride for you. A typo meant you let your kid out of the house without any pants on.

My mother was an editor. She had red felt pens by her typewriter, on the kitchen table, in her purse. Clean prose was scripture in our house. Being wrong was bad.

When she died, something happened to my brain. My handwriting shifted, became more of a scribble, harder to read. I couldn’t picture words in my head any more and so spelling became a challenge. When I wrote and then proofread, I couldn’t see errors, and so I wrote a book and countless blog posts that were all rife with typos. I write blog posts that are rife with typos.

I can’t see them.

And part of me, a dark, secret, gleeful part, doesn’t look for them.

Because here’s the thing: when my mother died, I finally was able to write. And I keep writing. And I keep making mistakes for the world to see.

But I’m trying. I’m showing up.

And I think being there is better than being perfect.