After years in the business world, she is considering changing careers: she thinks she might like to become a teacher. High school English. So she asked me about it.
“Somebody told me that if you love the students, you’ll teach high school, but if you love the subject, you’ll teach college.” She sets this sentence down between us on the coffee table—just something for us to talk about, something for me to respond to. It is mine to agree or disagree; this is all new to her; she just wants my opinion.
But the sentence has some serious architecture to it. Yes, it has infrastructure, and it took shape there as a postulate in geometry class—something for me to disprove, challenge, acquiese to. But I definitely had to reckon with it. No question.
It’s not as though the idea hadn’t come to me before. I think I myself believed as much when I decided, way back when, to drop the secondary ed certification requirements from my major and just do a full-throttle English kind of thing. I loved my lit courses, loved my writing courses, had long since fallen in love with the dictionary, enjoyed nothing more than quiet solitary hours in the library pouring over books. Yes, I thought. I’ll drop this secondary ed thing and get an English degree and then go to graduate school and become a professor.
And there was more: I would also never marry, and I would get a golden retriever and live in Maine and be brilliant and enjoy the attentions of various men in varying degrees of dashing who would all love me for my amazing mind.
But by that time—whoops!—I had already fallen in love with Bill. Moreover, I had already satisfied most of the requirements for my secondary ed certification, and so dropping that now would only come to Wasted Time.
So I served my time, and took those last few courses. And then I did my student teaching, and I Loved It.
It wasn’t like the study I had been enjoying. Not at all. But we read an excerpt of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and we did a lot of writing, and I taught a unit on poetry, during which time my students got so good at reading and understanding poetry that they were able to Really Enjoy poems by e.e.cummings. And something else happened: those classes of twenty or twenty-five students became Individual People who had varying degrees of success with writing and tremendous success in finding their ways into my affection.
Still, I did not want to teach high school. What I wanted was to go to graduate school. I wanted more study, more literature, more in-depth conversations about books and poetry, more quiet hours in the library. I had already gotten married, so the possibility of the attentions of various men was Decidedly Over; but it was the Mind I was truly after, the Mind and its Life. And so far as I could see, lesson plans and the regular hours of a school day would Decidedly Interfere with that.
Nonetheless, I found myself teaching. And it took All My Time, and it took All My Energy, and those few students I had at that tiny school in western Pennsylvania took so much of my honest love and affection that it took my breath away.
I taught them for only one year, but I loved them fiercely, and I still do.
And then it was off to Pittsburgh with me, teaching at a junior/senior high school, teaching 7th and 8th grade English, which is, for many, the Equivalent Of Hell.
I am sure that, in those five classes I taught that year, there were students who Did Not Like Me. There were many students who were, I am certain, Indifferent. But I liked Every One of Them—even the two who sat at the back of the room during 8th period and reminded me—seriously—of Beavus and Butthead.
And some of them I really, really loved. And when we moved, at the end of that school year, to North Carolina, I was Very Sad to leave them.
But the thing about teaching is that you can pretty much find a job anywhere, and before long I was back at it, plying my trade in yet another high school, introducing Shakespeare to a class of freshmen students.
The pleasure here was that I stayed with these students. Yes, there was that brief hiatus in Switzerland, that one during which all my longings to become pregnant were finally satisfied. But over the course of my son’s first two years, I went back to that school to teach those same students as a long-term substitute, so that I was sitting with the faculty on their graduation day.
Then they went off to college, and I stayed at home and had two more babies and went—at long last—to graduate school.
I Loved Graduate School.
And now I am back in the classroom, still trying to get to know these twenty students who fill my days and whose writing fills my evenings. They pop up with increasing frequency in my dreams. Some of them—the ones who babysit—have been in my house. We have reached the halfway mark of the school year; before I know it, they will be sophomores and, if all goes as it should, we’ll be at it together again: 10th grade humanities.
Sometimes I am almost overwhelmed by them and this curriculum. This is By Far the most intellectually challenging work I have ever done as a teacher. Sometimes I come almost to tears thinking about the book I Am Not Reading for my Master’s thesis, the one that sits on my bedside table, firmly closed. Sometimes I want nothing more than to be alone for hours with a book and a pen and the quiet thinking of my own mind.
On Friday night I was invited to a party. It was a reunion of sorts for those students who were in ninth grade when we moved to North Carolina twelve years ago. Bill and I and my old and dear teaching chum Karen went together—and there they were. Not all of them, no. But Some of Them. Some of them brought spouses, some brought significant others, some brought babies. Yes, there they were, more real and beautiful than I had remembered them, living real grownup lives and carrying with them, somehow, those hours and hours we once spent together in a classroom.
You don’t get that with research.
Teaching high school costs me. It costs me Serious Time, and Energy, and that Silence and Solitude that I love. But there will be time for that when I’m older.
There is No Doubt that I love my subject. But I love my students, too. Oh My, Yes.
