In response to Wednesday's post, esteemed Stank troll Dinah asks the obvious question: okay then, why do you teach?
"For the money and prestige," I thought.
"For the sex," chimes another reader, a female high school teacher who declines to be identified. Coward.
It started at Ohio State, where the English department chair threw me in front of a class as part of her research. I was a talented student and writer, at the height of youthful insolence—I fully expected to succeed. I failed spectacularly. And within a quarter, the experiment was over, and I was left with the horrible taste of failure in my mouth. This was nothing new—I'd taken Calculus—but I did not expect to fail at imparting to others what I myself did best.
When I was shopping myself to grad schools, my first criterion was my own curriculum, and my second, the opportunity to teach composition. I very much looked at grad school as a bookend to my years at Ohio State. Grad school would teach me what Ohio State failed to, and it would provide me a chance to redress my greatest failure.
In the months leading up to that class, I studied and studied hard. I'd taken preparation lightly before, relying, as I always had, on my ability to adjust on the fly. No longer. That had failed me utterly. This time, I would prepare hard and slay the beast. And so I entered my second classroom, and I failed again.
Third classroom, third failure.
Around the fourth classroom, I started coming into my own. Two things happened: I developed my own, more improvisational style and lesson plan; and I started to enjoy myself. It seems obvious, but only in retrospect did I realize that if you're not having any fun, your students ain't exactly dancin' a jig, either. My own intellectual development surged; there's nothing like having to teach a subject matter to compel you to learn it forwards and back, and fast. Spending every minute of every day putting myself in other people's heads, I built up my critical-thinking muscles. As I started becoming more effective, the kids grew more engaged, and I started getting hooked on pride in their accomplishments. It's an addiction roughly like crack, only more expensive.
By the time I left grad school, I wouldn't say I was the best teacher in the world, but I'd come a long way, and my students tested better than anyone else's, so I had that as a metric on which I could forever hang my teacher hat. When I graduated and had a job in hand, the university asked me to apply for a teaching job in which I would have been brutalized (six classes/day with four different preps, and after five years you're fired no matter what) for about a third of what I would make as a lowly copyeditor in Seattle. I declined.
And then the whole Fucking Amy thing happened. And then I ended up at Microsoft, indexing SQL Server documentation. Twin pillars of happiness, they. I couldn't believe how little what I did mattered. I clearly remember sitting at my desk, numb. Bored. Hollowed out. Soulless. Unchallenged. Not doing or learning anything of value. Not growing. Hating myself for not taking that horrible teaching job. The initial realization that what you do all day just doesn't matter, at all, to yourself or anyone, is the hardest. And on the heels of teaching it was quite the fall indeed.
Moral: you start your career as a drone and move on to teaching, not vice versa.
But for the first time in my life, I wasn't poor. Unwilling to take a vow of poverty, I thought for a while about getting my doctorate, but that hardly seemed like a cure for poverty. I decided I could fuel my soul by teaching just one class a year, as adjunct faculty, and I started making contacts at my first choice of universities.
And here we are, several years later, plan in fruition. I catch at least two plagiarizers a quarter, I have students stealing my out-of-print textbooks, and the privilege only costs me $10,756/quarter in lost income and expenses.
Still better than Microsoft.