Directions

I was thinking about school and my job. After all, that is why we're here--to teach. We were hired because we have something unique to offer. Last year we discovered what that was and this year we work hard to maximize its potential and effectiveness. I try to keep in mind the portability of what I do, using it as a proving ground for when I get back home. At the same time, I try to remember to treasure this experience and notice the people and the environment around me. It's easy to get locked into a notion that this is somehow a lesser version of what happens back home, but that’s not true.

Like most people, every now and then I’m overcome by a mind-numbing drudgery in my job--the feeling that I’m traveling in the same well-worn ruts. Each measure of progress or sensation of movement easily anticipated and any sense of uncertainty or urgency is encountered or experienced disappears as fast as it came. It’s the reason we decided to come here to the Middle East. We were forced to leave those predictable tracks.  

In this second year I’m familiar with this place and, and while I’ve escaped the ruts of past experiences, I haven’t escaped my own mind. No matter how different the terrain looks, the tools and strategies for negotiating it remain the same.

The interplay between expectation and reality is tricky sometimes and so to know a thing is not necessarily to understand it. I read Parker Palmer’s book The Courage to Teach about once a year because of this. His descriptions are filled with such precision and remind me that feelings of confidence, fraudulence, fortune or uncertainty are normal for anyone invested in what they do.

I’ll never be a “great” teacher in the technical NCTE sense of the word. I don’t have the sort of facility with the bullshit required to sustain it or even the brand of curiosity needed to maintain it. I am the teacher I am, just as I am the husband, dad, son, friend, and brother I am.

No matter how turned around I might get sometimes in my own head where I question or compare or second guess my motives or the mystery of why things are the way they are, I know to just accept it. That isn’t to say I shouldn’t work and strive to be better, but in the midst of the striving, it is important to understand that this is what I have to work with and so the result is always going to be within a few degrees of where I began. A few degrees doesn’t seem like much, but it can leave you standing in refreshingly unfamiliar territory.