Vocation and Paralysis

The first question listed below by Jim Stenson is this: Do I have a sense of "vocation" about my teaching career? Do I strive to be an excellent professional, enjoying (as Aristotle put it) "the full use of one's powers along lines of excellence"?

My answer, written while sitting crosslegged on the curb of our parking lot, cut off from the flowering trees on the green and lovely lawn abutting the concrete roof of the nearby reservoir by the active sprinklers, is as follows:

Do I have a sense of "vocation" about my teaching career? Not particularly … well, yes and no. Sometimes I feel that I became a teacher because, if I ever have wanted to become anything, it is a writer, and as I don’t know what else I would do otherwise, and I haven’t become (or made myself) a writer, I might as well teach the writing I’ve read. That said, what else is writing but teaching your readers about politics, beauty, love, God, or whatever subject you take up? In addition, I genuinely enjoy discussing and exploring literature, sharing my own insights and theories and debating others. And even though I have not made myself a true literary scholar, have not engaged with the writing of others as deeply or widely as I should have, perhaps through cowardice or laziness or that mysterious inertic death urge that I let overcome so many of my plans, I still enjoy it.

Do I strive to be an excellent professional, enjoying (as Aristotle put it) "the full use of one's powers along lines of excellence"? No. I am not sure if I am lazy or simply perverse, but ever since I can remember, anything I objectively ought to do or subjectively think I should do, is distasteful to me. As a boy, I found the history book fascinating, butnot the part I was assigned. The Nazis fed my curiousity when the Aztecs had no flavour, but when I found the wars of religion putting me to sleep, those empires of the undiscovered Americas suddenly became bright and interesting. As an adult I am the same way: anything that smacks of obligation I am loathe to do. For this reason I was doubtful when the pedagogy pedants told us that one of our chief duties was making our material interesting through relevance. But, “Relevance be damned,” says the callow youth, “What will it cost me not to do it?” I am overstating my case, I suppose, smearing others with my own extrapolated perversity, and I know from experience that some teachers inspire and some dispirit, but I never wrote the papers of even my favorite classes until the night before.

I strive now and then, and put work into this and that, surf on sudden surges that carry me at their crest for an evening, a day, a week or sometimes more.

More was planned, but you know how reflection time is during teacher orientation week: it's not exactly a week at the Abbey of Gethsemane, or a lifetime in the desert, is it?

Off to grade summer papers - a drudgery that I sometimes enjoy, but I can hardly admit that, even to myself.