A Little Introspection

I'd like to share an excerpt from the beginning of my cover letter for my reflective teaching portfolio (it's obviously in the draft stages, I'm just putting it out there to perhaps generate some discussion):

"I don’t know who learned more this semester: me or my students. As I began teaching for the first time, I found that the gap between theory (in which I was fairly well versed) and practice (which I had none at all) was a lot larger than I had imagined. At the beginning of the semester, I found myself standing on the theory side of a very large canyon, faced with how I would get to the practice side. I could not easily step over the gap as I had previously imagined. I had to find other ways to connect the two sides so that my teaching would not be totally divorced from the material realities of the classroom, and so that they would inform each other. Over the semester, I did a lot of things to try and close that gap: I built bridges of various kinds, I had people assist, and I took a chance on running and jumping. Most of these attempts ended in me flying easily over the gap. Some of them, however, ended in me crashing onto the canyon floor, staring up at my students peering down at me with quizzical expressions, not knowing if I could bring myself to go back to teaching ever (ever, EVER!) again..."