Imposter Syndrome

I know I have it -- I feel like a fake and not even a real fake, but a fake fake. I don't know what I'm doing and that's because I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing.

Here's the thing: I'm a high school English teacher, but no one ever really says "this is the stuff in American Lit that needs to be covered." I left grad school knowing the texts I know and knowing how to discuss certain ideas, as a shadow of what I learned in grad school from a teacher who, I assumed, knew what was Important for me to know and communicate. But nothing more than that. But does that make for the high school curriculum. Sure, I learned all about Romantic poetry and can talk about that with students, but does that make any discussion I have the backbone of essential facts about literature that any and every student has to know?

Do I just not know the most basic and essential of the theses, tenets and themes of literature? Or is it that each teacher takes a limited and local lesson which resonated with him or her when he or she learned it and presented it as a gospel concept, a standard that we can expect that everyone else must automatically become aware of and agree with?

A teacher here spoke often of the American Voice, that expression of "America" in writing which wasn't just a transplanted European voice, but was the result of something unique and purely American, quantifiable and reflective of that distinct identity that developed outside of as a reaction to Europe but as an outporuring of what can only be extant in this country? Is that concept idea just what he learned and so he asserts it as a given, the organic and innate understanding which all who call themselves "English teachers" have either formally learned or intuited through their exposure to literature through a "proper education"? Is there a canon of mainstream sine qua nons and I just never got the memo?

Is "American Voice" some sort of canonical conceit endemic to the study of American Literature (when taught by a "real" teacher) or was it just the lens that a teacher imported from his or her own English classes in college or grad school or professor/book of choice? Could I talk about "Otherization, Assimilation and Alienation" as if it is the essential lens through which everyone should naturally be looking at the representation of the American experience and sneer (and/or condescend) at everyone who doesn't automatically accept and adopt it as a driving schema? Would that make it central simply because I act as if it is? Is authority reflexively conferred by simple assertion of authority? Or is "American Voice" a well-known and scholarly accepted aspect of the study of American Lit and it represents yet another loop out of which I am?

Either I'm a fraud because I don't know the answer, or a fraud because the answer is obvious and I'm still asking the question.

Alternate title was "What's up, Doctrine"