Self-Doubt and the First-Year College Teaching Experience

Though I have come across a few threads and forums for first-year
teaching experiences, it seems we need one specific for grad students
and the first adjunct position.

Let me in the least say that I am a Ph.D. student, writing my
dissertation, and desperately trying to be successful in the
classroom.

That said...Before we step into the classroom, we grad students have
typically spent the last (if we include our own undergraduate study)
ca. 10 years under the tutelage of another. Our role has been the
receptor. Knowledge pours forth from our professors and we faithfully
determine whether or not we want to accept that knowledge. Most often
we do, though we may debate the finer points. This merely is one
attribute of Academia.

The tables are violently overturned when we take that fateful first
step into role reversal. We feel confident, intellectual, and are
marked by dreams of romanticism of being the 'cool professor', or the
'wow! I learned a lot from him/her' professor. Such feelings and
dreams, inevitably, will come crashing down after the first few
lectures. Now enters another: self-doubt.

Every lecture turns into an antagonist. We become tongue-tied,
uncertain, and frustrated. Nagging questions pester like flies on an
open wound: 'Did I even make sense?' 'Why did I skip over the
important points?' etc.  We become consumed with the frustration of
failure, shattered dreams, and hopelessness. Rather than the 'wow! I
learned a lot from him/her' professor, we fear we have become the
'what in the world is this dork talking about?' professor.

No one ever tells us that the first-year teaching experience will be,
in short, hell.

Please, feel free to share. Hopefully, we can set up an area wherein
first-year 'experience-rs' will be able to know they are not alone.
Grad school is, by nature, very isolationist, and at times it is
refreshing to hear we are not the only ones enduring such experiences
as the self-doubt of the first-year teaching experience.