STILL TEACHING?

"When you going to retire?"--some people ask, as if I have been hanging around too long already. At age 61 and in my eighteenth year of teaching, some think that I couldn't have much else to say, nothing to add pedagogically to our collective education, and can't possibly continue to guide the moral lives of young people. Perhaps this is true. But after lately living awash in too much Weltschmerz--despondency caused by the seemingly ubiquitous lying, urban-legend emails (the actual state of the world) spread about Sen. Barak Obama compared to the reality of his unique background (the truth as the ideal state of the world)--I could use some levity for a topic to think about. So, this anecdote.

Back to my teaching career: I will continue to teach as long as it is (relatively) fun and I think I have something to contribute. Since I grew up as a printer's devil at my father's newspaper office, in Central City, Kentucky, a job that I began around age six, and one that kept me covered in ink--anything after that would be seen as a better way to work for a living. I remember being smeared nearly completely over my adolescent body with black, greasy, probably poisonous, large and small streaks of newsprint ink. Back then, in the era of "dirty news-type," I was the Dickensian picture of a blackened child-laborer, who crawled under the large rumbling, hissing news press to gather up any pieces of ink-covered newsprint that had fallen there. All work after that would be considered a relief. I think I'll continue teaching.

I also have had jobs shoveling asphalt onto summer heat-shimmering roads and dead dogs off them in Muhlenberg County, Ky.; laying sod while yanking fingernails in Louisville, Ky.; selling men's apparel to surly customers at a clothing store in Lexington, Ky.; building houses as a general laborer in Napa Valley, Calif.; gathering Douglas fir cones from the tops of very tall swaying trees near Mt. Shasta, Calif.; landscaping and harvesting avocados in San Luis Obispo, Calif.; child-caring for two brats of a music-industry executive in Malibu, Calif.; and schlepping luggage as a bellman at a hotel in Biloxi, Miss. I also caught fierce, non-cooperative NASA rhesus monkeys, injecting them with knock-out sedatives, in order to clean their wounds in a basement of the Chandler Medical Center in Lexington, Ky.

So, you see that after all these grievous jobs, teaching is a relief. Eating newsprint ink, sodding, hammering, shoveling fetid dead dogs, and injecting fanged monkeys were never considered as vocations. I'll keep on teaching.

THE LINE

At the front line.
How many jobs do you know
where you have to deal with hormonal emotions
of your clients?
And if you don’t handle it well,
there could be an explosion
by your clients
maneuvering at the front line.

On the line.
How many jobs do you know
where you have to explain your behavior
to the guardians of your clients?
And if your explanation
is not accepted,
you feel your career
is on the line.

Between the lines.
How many jobs do you know
where you have to interpret communications
from superiors, clients, guardians?
And if your interpretation
is not accepted,
you are told you should have read
between the lines.

Lay it on the line.
Which job requires you to perform
every day in front of your clients
who transfer their feelings
toward authority onto you?
And if you do not perform well,
your clients could react negatively
as you and they lay it on the line.

And your superiors who deal with the public
expect you to push your clients
to always perform better.
And your clients’ guardians with family turmoil
expect you to understand their problems
and deal with them sympathetically.
And your clients expect you to
entertain like their entertainers.

Instead, you are at the front line
reading between the lines
laying it all on the line
with your job on the line
dealing with emotions,
behavior, communications,
authority, and entertainment--
because you are the Teacher.