Minor Panic

So, here's a quick-and-dirty sketch of my current existence. I have finished the coursework for a Master's degree in English Teaching at the much-esteemed (yeah, right) University of New Hampshire (please, hold your applause). Being the strong-willed, sometimes single-minded woman that I am, I have annoyed, cajoled, and generally bullied my way into having UNH allow me to do an internship placement at a high school that has a D/HH program. The Universe has provided very well for me in this respect; though I had to energetically fight the establishment at the university ("I don't know if we can let you do that" and "no one's ever asked to do an internship outside of their major before" and "don't you need a Special Ed. degree to teach Deaf kids" were heard with startling regularity), I managed to find myself an AMAZING cooperating teacher, a very supportive and enthusiastic program director (Mike Wallace, for those of you who might know him) and, it turns out, a pretty damned cool UNH supervisor as well. So, what's my problem, you ask? What's the panic about?

I start teaching in less than a month and a half. While my confidence for TEACHING is high - I'm pretty sure that I could walk into a classroom and get the job done as well as, or better than, any just-graduating-from-college twentysomething - I'm NOT so confident about my ability to communicate in ASL. I feel as though my language skills should be better, stronger, more nuanced. I can get some basic points across, but I haven't got the fluency for creativity or sarcasm or any of the subtleties of, say, The Scarlet Letter.

The people who are being supportive of me (and there are a few, but my insecurities about family and friends as they relate to my professional life is the subject for another entry) tell me, with unabashed certainty, that I will "pick it up" in short order and that the students won't suffer for my learning curve. These assurances are coming from people I trust and whom I believe are genuinely interested in seeing me succeed. I've been spending a fair bit of energy trying to figure out how to make THEIR voices louder than the ones in my head that are telling me I'm going to end up flat on my face by October at the latest.