How do we know when to give up our childish fantasies? What if we don't know if our fantasies are childish or really meant to be?
I've had this fantasy, off and on for many years, about moving to
I got caught up in contemplating these things on the way home from teaching tonight. Every time after I teach lately, I am launched into an existential crisis- it doesn't matter if the class goes particularly horribly or particularly wonderfully: existential crisis will follow. And these crises tend to involve deep contemplations on the direction of my life. Usually, I come around to the conclusion that I don't want to teach forever and that I'd like to pursue my true passion: editing. And then I begin to pit teaching against editing (my mom once aptly noted that I have a penchant for pitting not necessarily mutually exclusive ideas against one another). Suddenly, my teaching is the enemy of my editing. You can see how that gets hairy real quickly.
And another issue has been recently brought to my attention: my issues with teaching may not be universally true of all teaching. The main issues I have are as follows: laziness, disinterest, lack of effort, negative attitudes, adults behaving like children, grading shitty papers, etc. A former professor of mine (and an all-around wonderful woman who was, in fact, one of the original inspirations for my decision to become a college instructor) recently told me that she taught freshman English once and that if she had to teach freshman comp for the rest of her life, she wouldn't be teaching. This was something of a revelation for me as I've gotten so heavily entrenched in the notion that if I'm going to teach, I'm going to teach freshman to write.
Her confession trudged up all kinds of buried emotions and convictions, ones that have been lost to years of graduate school and conflicting voices and personal tragedies. At the forefront of such convictions was the one that if I was going to teach, I was going to teach literature to college students. How had I lost that goal? I had lost it so completely. I think it happened in stages. First I was told at the beginning of grad school to declare my primary subject as composition so I would be more likely to get a job teaching at the community college level. This piece of advice was given to me despite the fact that I had said I wanted to teach literature and it was accepted without my having a real understanding of the difference between teaching literature and teaching freshman composition. I think the next step was my beginning to teach composition and discovering that I am good at it. It was just a matter of time before I was saying I wanted to pursue a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition, not literature. What?
Recently, it has all become quite clear to me how much my original desire has become convoluted into something entirely different, and with just a tweak here and a minor adjustment there. You don't even realize you're compromising; you do it in the name of being practical, growing up, being adult.
So what does all this mean? I don't at all regret my time teaching composition and I will continue to do it for a while longer in my life, but now I know that I have not arrived to where I want to be but only where I'd convinced myself I should be. I still don't know if attempting to become an editor in NYC is in the cards for me; but if it is just a childish fantasy, it exists to agitate me into moving my life in a different direction. And that direction, one way or another, is toward a life filled with the thing that has dictated most of the major decisions I've made thus far: literature.
Until next time,
Leena
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