<< Back 9/11/02 Teaching matters, despite the cliches By Jay Hardwig Oh Sweet Jesus. I have just finished reading an essay. It is an essay I wrote for the Yancey County School District, where I once wished to teach. It is a fine essay: it is about my love of the classroom, about the quiet splendor of teaching, about fiery determination and the fleeting gift of youth. It should make me proud, proud to be a font of such virtue and humility. Instead it gives me gas. I read it and wince. It is a solid stream of lofty lavender gush. What is it about teaching that brings out the after-school specials writer in me? It is full of strength and struggle, hugs and teardrops. It is sentimental, life-affirming, gently glowing. Pick your cliché. Absolutely dreary. In my youth, I imagined a life of vim, vigor, and the hard edge of steely experience. Now my personal statement reads like a Hallmark card. It would fit well in Parade magazine, sandwiched between Ask Marilyn and Howard Huge. Dear God has it come to this? I can’t say I’m surprised. I’ve noticed these feelings before. The essay marks the first time, however, that I put them into words. And such bad words at that. I suspect that two things are at work here. The first is the bad habit, so common to teachers, of idealizing the teaching experience. We sugarcoat for public consumption, of course — for whom among us doesn’t love the hard-working teacher? — but moreso we do it for ourselves. Any teacher can tell you, and will if given half a chance, that we in the trade have taken jobs that are low-paying, low-glamour, downright pedestrian. We know we won’t get the wows and huzzahs at the college reunion, and sympathetic letters-to-the-editor from well-meaning school boosters only go so far. Teachers are commonplace, trifling, and never very stylish. Boring. We compensate by telling ourselves the old tale of the teacher as saint, the quiet hero who traffics in hopes, dreams, and gilded wings. The more blasé among us may go so far as to cringe at the tired aphorisms that crop up on bumper stickers in the faculty parking lot — I touch the future, I teach — but we believe them just the same. In our own way, we are as vain as the lawyers, accountants, and mutual fund managers who whizz by our schools in late-model cars, stroking their chins with keen self-satisfaction. We just aren’t as loud about it. The second reason my essay was so predictably bad — filled with those same tired sentiments that adorn teachers’ coffee cups from Anchorage to Altoona — is that those predictably bad sentiments are also profoundly true. As a teacher, I have been touched in ways I never imagined, and at times the rest of the world seems pale by comparison. There is that sense, sentimentality be damned, that when a student, any student, of any age, ability, or circumstance, is challenged, moved, comforted, or simply heard — there is a sense that what has happened there is real, wise, meaningful. There is power in these moments to change the world; there is the suspicion that it already has. The change, the power, the courage, is a daily experience. It matters. I speak in generalities, abstractions. If there are days when these beautiful certainties flood the heart, there are as many when they slow to a trickle, or finally stop. There are days when you want nothing more than for the cursed beasties to go home, get out of your hair, shut up with that damned whining; when you wish you could have a cup of coffee in peace, to turn on the radio, talk to your plants, and stare quietly at a computer screen like the perfectly happy people who work in Personnel. To indulge the absent mind. To sing along to Beach Boys classics. To do things one at a time. To pee when you want to. But those days are rare, at least for the charmed among us. And if they are rare enough, and the inspiring ones frequent enough, there is more than enough reason to keep going, more than enough reward to offset the missed opportunities, coffee breaks and late model cars; there is more than enough flat-out joy to compensate for the late nights, the urinary tract infection, the emotional exhaustion; there is more than enough, and then some. When I was a youth I resolved to live my life with passion. Despite my tame appearance — trimmed nails, weak in the chin, a bit round about the edges — I know that I have done so. I have sung to bears, climbed Cape Horn, swam naked in Smoky Mountain streams. I have sipped sangria in the cuevas of Madrid, drank cheap sweet beer at the Deep Eddy Cabaret, and shot tequila on the streets of Tijuana. I have pounded the piano till my fingers cracked, drawn blood on the rugby pitch, and counted all the stars in the sky. I have watched wild lions devour a freshly-killed wildebeest. I have haggled for bananas on the Senegalese seashore. I have walked the beach at Ipanema. I have seen BB King and Buckwheat Zydeco. I have sank the winning jump shot in countless playground battles. I have been to Fenway Park. I have married the woman of my dreams, and given birth to a boy who makes me swell with pride. Add to this one more: I have taught. Bumper sticker, anyone? Jay Hardwig is a writer and teacher who lives in Asheville.