When I first started teaching, I used to believe that to be a good teacher, one had to take it on like a religious calling, hermit-ize oneself like a monk, live for the job and only for the job.
My first years at PeeVee were like that. My evenings and weekends were filled with grading and reading. My weekends and summers were filled with planning for teaching: creating lesson plans, cutting and pasting together literature pieces, creating units. I don’t think a single day went by in my first four years of teaching that I did not do something classroom-oriented. Some would call this sick, obsessive. I called it "doing the job right."
After my first failed marriage (I would say, "her fault, not mine," but I know that would sound too suspect, given the subject of this entry... but it’s true), my mind began to take on the seeds of doubt. Maybe one could be a successful teacher without the vow of monkdom... Naw. It would be better to marry a teacher. Then you could both be crazy... I mean, "right." Thank god Lisa came back into my life.
However, the seeds of doubt had been planted too deeply, too deeply to not be blown from my fertile mind, and not deep enough that the sunshine of truth couldn’t cause the little bastards to germinate (gotta love a fully realized extended metaphor!). By the time I reached Chumash, I was ready to test the thesis: one could be a great teacher without having teaching be the be-all/end-all of his existence. Lisa had seemed to master the philosophy; she’s a very good teacher and she doesn’t obsess over classes. I could, too. Or so I thought.
Of course, that first year at C.H.S. was real nadir in my philosophy and career. At times, I was curled up on the bathroom floor, saying that I no longer wanted to do this. Only by the end of the year, with its drama productions and my resumption of writing (the beginnings of a still-unfinished vampire novel and then a completed screenplay), was I able to find other activities in my life to make teaching a bearable priority. But it was no longer my be-all/end-all, my raison d’être. If it had been, I would have quit that year.
Thus, I had doffed the mantle of the obsessive teacher. But I concurrently began to doubt my effectiveness. I felt guilty over my non-obsessing. And I thought that I might not be as good now as I had been when I was Mr. My-Life-is-Teaching.
The doubts remain today. Maybe one doesn’t need to be a monk to do the job well. But maybe I do. I can never be sure now. There is no control group, there is no way for me to compare the apples at PeeVee to the oranges at Chumash. All I know is that I’m not happy with the results I’m getting here and now.
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