A friend of mine has started teaching at a local high school.
While it's too early to tell, this may be the beginning of a second career for him. He retired from his job as a federal lawyer a few years ago, but he's too young to be really retired. So for the last couple of years he'd been subbing here and there, and when a situation arose he was willing to step in and take over another teacher's classes for the duration. Which could be a couple of weeks. Or until the end of the semester. Or longer.
He's got six classes and two subjects--history is the one he feels well-qualified to teach. His other class, marketing, is more art than science, but he can probably get up to speed on it fairly quickly.
I don't know how it's going. Maybe when the weather gets better, he's going to feel like he'd rather be out on the golf course than stuck in a box with a bunch of adolescents. He might wash out, defeated by the stress that's inherent in the job. He might decide it isn't how he wants to spend his time. He's fortunate to have options, to be able to afford to walk away if he decides the work doesn't suit him.
He still practices law from time to time, and he's a mentor at the law school. Last week he mentioned to his class that he had a meeting at the law school. One of his kids asked him what year he was in.
Ba-dum-dump.
"I underestimated how hard teaching is going in to it," he told me during the middle of his second week on the job. "Practicing law is harder in a certain transactional sense in that you have to juggle many things between people that are in competition for those same things. My career was spent applying technical knowledge in the service of those competing things.
"But teaching is hard. Really hard," he says. "At least it is if you want to be good at it. As one of my new colleagues said to me, 'You have to bring the A game every day.' Which you have to do in most lines of work. Even if you don't have to deal with 17-year-olds."
I don't know about most lines of work. I think most of us can probably get by with our C games most of the time. (At least I hope so.) But I am sure that teaching is plenty hard.
Teaching is one of those holy professions we're supposed to make certain noises about. We're supposed to romanticize it, go all Dead Poets Society or Goodbye, Mr. Chips over the job, talk about how it's a calling, and how we ought to appreciate those who sacrifice to take it on. But the truth is, our society doesn't value the profession; despite the lip service paid to it by politicians and people like me, teaching is neither a lucrative or high-status job. A lot of us, if we are honest, look on teaching as something to fall back on, a safety net to catch those who can't quite do.
That attitude is one reason why we're having trouble attracting new teachers, and why we probably need to think about programs like Teach for America as well as recruiting folks like my friend who, with his pension and relatively low overhead, can afford to be content with the relatively modest remuneration that comes with his new job.
Most of us understand teaching is important. And difficult to do well.
While a lot of us can remember teachers who were important to us, many teachers are by definition mediocre--and some are simply incapable of doing what they were hired to do. I know a lot of teachers, or at least a lot of people who pursued teaching at some point in their life. Some of them are very good. Some of them are indifferent. Some of them are stealing money.
Some of these really terrible teachers I liked personally (many were a little too interested in having kids like me like them). It's not all on them that I didn't get as much out of my education as I should have--when it comes down to it I think most educated people are really autodidactics anyway. It's not my teachers' fault I didn't apply myself more in high school and college; grades always came pretty easy to me, and I mistakenly thought that was the point of my schooling.
But the best teachers touched off something, a curiosity that maybe didn't even have much to do with the subject at hand. They didn't impart facts so much as modes of thinking. They didn't answer questions so much as lead students to ask different kinds of questions.
And that's hard to do. I've tried it, and I understand that to be a really great teacher, you have to care more about your students than your subject. I'm not sure I could survive in an environment rich in distracted teenagers.
But I hope it works out for my friend. He strikes me as exactly the sort of person who ought to teach. He's intelligent and compassionate, and while he maintains some fairly strong opinions about the way the world works, he understands that not everyone has had the advantages he has had. He comes from a background that required him to be responsible, to work hard to achieve what he's achieved. He's not embarrassed to have meaningful conversations about serious things, and he can argue in a way that doesn't devolve into ad hominen abuse. He's a grownup in the way he conducts his life and business; he provides an excellent model to young folks.
"I don't want to make a big deal out of my being here," he tells me. He says the faculty have been great "to the alien in their presence.
"I get to do arias about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights," he says. "Arias sounds better than 'go off on tangents.' I have my nose in the history book. I research stuff that seems wrong in the history book. I line up speakers for the marketing class. I hang around real teachers in the lounge and soak up their knowledge by osmosis.
"I bang my way through the hall every day. Boys criss-crossing ahead of me and mumbling apologies. I get to hang around smart people from 8 to 3. And I get to do it again the next day.
"It's pretty wonderful. But boy, am I tired."
And that's how it's supposed to be. Exhausting. Wonderful. And not for everyone.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 01/31/2016