Teaching, and Now, Retirement*
On May 31, I resigned my faculty position teaching English at a small high school. The school solely served at-risk students who had been removed from the home for various reasons; most of them had gotten in trouble with the law, but all of them came from extremely dysfunctional families. As, probably, do a great deal of students in America. I have deeply loved my students, but I can only describe that love as a running of one’s hand backwards against the grain of wood. That doesn’t sound pleasant because most of the time it wasn’t (much of love isn’t pleasant, yes?), but I have been shaped by it. I will always feel that grain, and even when my hand is at rest, I’m sure there will be the phantom brush across my knuckles. I taught for six years, and I don’t believe I’ll enter education again; not because of the education system, but because I’m on the cusp of middle age and I’m beginning to realize with some anxiety that if I don’t free up some time to accomplish the things I set out to do when I was 20, then there will be no more time.
Fittingly, I was reading Marilynne Robinson’s “Home” this morning:
“None of this had mattered much through all the years of her studies and teaching, but now, in the middle of the night, it was part of the loneliness she felt, as if the sense that everything could have been otherwise were a palpable darkness. Darkness visible. That was Milton.
Those grown children had, almost all of them, bent their heads over whatever work she gave them, even though their bodies were awkward and restless with the onset of adulthood, fate creeping through their veins and glands and follicles like a subtle poison, making them images of their parents and strangers to themselves. There was humor in it of a kind that might raise questions about the humorist.
Why do we have to read poetry? Why ‘Il Penseroso’? Read it and you’ll know why. If you still don’t know, read it again. And again. Some them took the things she said to heart, as she had done once when they were said to her. She was helping them assume their humanity. People have always made poetry, she told them. Trust that it will matter to you. The pompous clatter of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ moved some of them to tears, and then she had talked to them about bad poetry. Who gets to say what’s good and what’s bad? I do, she said. For the moment. You don’t have to agree, but listen. Some of them did listen. This seemed to her to be perfectly miraculous. No wonder she dreamed at night that she had lost any claim to their attention. What claim did she have? Could it be that certain of them lifted their faces to her so credulously because what she told them was true, that they were human beings, keepers of lore, makers of it? That it was really they who made demands of her?”
That credulity; that trust.