Teaching beats reading any day!

It's been three months since I started the PhD, it's also fast approaching the end of 2009. I'm in a slight panic. What do I have to show for my three months of scholarship? I'm worrying that it's not very much. The more I read, the more I realise that there is so much I need to know, so much I don't know, and so much that seems out of my intellectual reach. All the 'isms' out there, just when I think, hell I understand this – I then read something else about the same 'ism' and it doesn't make sense anymore…arggghhh! It's almost as if my level of understanding is simply at the basic descriptive level, within that particularly temporal moment, the moment is fleeting – once the moment is gone, so is my understanding. I fail to transfer the understanding into other contexts. But I love when I read other people's work and see how well they understand the object of their analysis. How they actually unpack the actual nature of complexity that they invariably find. I like this idea that I must be able to explain the nature of 'complexity' in how student learn, how they come to be a graduate, how they understand and use the various academic literacy practices they encounter in the educational environment they find themselves. And for that of course I must understand all these freaking 'isms'. So I need to read, read, read…and read some more. But one thing reading can't give you, is experience and the time to develop that level of experience. Again the more I read the work of some really insightful people in my field, or even listen to them in seminars or discussion groups, I realise how their understanding of one concept or idea has developed over time to a level of refinement that I can only dream of. They just know – how to use the concepts in different contexts, how to critique the concept from different positions, the origins of the concept and its evolution. I think getting to this point of insight only comes from working with the concept – theoretically and practically. Often I wish I was teaching the very concepts and theories I am trying to understand, so that I could internalise it. In order to teach something you really need to understand it – because your students will ask questions and demand that you deconstruct the concept and/or theory so that it makes sense to them. I miss teaching and I miss having a focus, a real life situation where the validity, the applicability, the dynamism, the changeability of a theory or concept can be 'tested'. It makes the theory/concept a real, living thing – not the abstract lifeless 'thing' I am trying to understand. I wonder if I will ever get over not being a teacher anymore.