I saw both ends of the world of education today. I spent most of the day at Carthage for our first faculty meeting of the year, and it was of course great fun to see so many colleagues for the first time since commencement. (And it had been even longer than that for certain faculty who were on leave last year.) But there was business to transact as well and, in particular, a heavy-hitting retreat on the weighty matter of Faculty Governance. . . an issue which raises all kinds of thorny questions with absolutely no easy answers at all. . . even when you have on hand a roomful of brilliant people, most of whom have their Ph.d. But some problems are not solvable through smarts and this is one of them. So I think most of us walked out of there feeling like we had run a very very tough gauntlet, as though we’d been forced to run a marathon while carrying a shot put the whole time. (And thanks to having to do mid-day at the radio station, I wasn’t even there for the whole thing.) Contributing further to my sense of exhaustion before we’ve even started is the semester is the fact that I will probably end up teaching 23 voice lessons this semester rather than the 16 which my load calls for. It’s not that I’m not excited – I am teaching 23 talented and interesting guys and it will probably be my most stimulating semester of voice lessons ever- but I have a feeling that I’ll be teaching some of these guys at 1 in the morning just to fit them all in.
Which is why it felt really good by mid-afternoon to have left the hallowed halls of High Education far behind to join Kathy at Schulte Elementary School, lending her a bit of assistance in preparing her room for the start of a new year. My wife was rather drastically behind in her efforts thanks to a rather serious computer catastrophe which appears to have caused the complete disappearance of everything – and I mean everything that was on her computer at the end of last year. . . every seating chart, every worksheet, every piece of correspondence, and even her iTunes playlist . . . . all gone. She has put out an S.O.S. to the Grand Emperor of Computer Matters at Racine Unified, but she fears that the help will be very late in coming and might not make a difference anyway. So she has pretty much resigned herself to reinventing the Wheel, which is bound to be perhaps the single most infuriating frustration of her whole life – and considering who she’s married to and what a pill he can be, that’s really saying something.
Anyway, it was the least I could do to step in and help her out for a little while this afternoon- and she ended up finding some fun jobs to do where the potential for causing harm to myself or others was pretty minimal. For instance, it was my job to put out all of her small musical instruments: bongos, finger cymbals, cowbells, etc. It was also my job to move around the tables in her room so her two brown tables were in the front row rather than the back row. (her reasoning was that kids tend to be a bit naughtier when they sit in the back, and if any of the “back row boys” wrote on their desk, Kathy wouldn’t be able to immediately spot it if one of her two dark brown tables had been defaced. So she wanted the tables changed around so those two darker tables could be put up front where the typical kid would never pull anything. (I’m pretty sure you have to have been a teacher for more than 20 years to think of stuff like that.) But the most fun of all was when I got to hang up a couple of different decorations in the hall, including the one pictured above: Be The Best You Can Be. If all a teacher had to do was put up fun bulletin boards, I would do it for free . . . but, of course, teaching involves a whole lot more than that – and these coming years are going to be extremely challenging for anyone teaching in our public schools. So I will leave that to the experts like my wife, but what a blast to step in for a few minutes and “play” teacher in the halls of an elementary school. It’s great for clearing the head, bolstering the spirit, and releasing tension. . . and it makes me wonder if every college professor shouldn’t be required to spend even one single day in the early fall volunteering their time in an elementary school classroom. . . just to reconnect with some of the most basic impulses which led us to become teachers in the first place. Being with kathy certainly reminded me of one thing that is especially important to remember, which is this: Teaching is Fun. It can also be a thankless, frustrating job for all kinds of different reasons – – – but at its heart, it’s the best job in the world and one I wouldn’t trade for all the Kit Kats in Kentucky. (Boy, do I miss chocolate bars.)
pictured: that’s me, hanging up the wall display that says “Be the Best you can Be.”