20181109.0430

As I write this, I've finished the first round of grading I get to do in the present teaching session. I am working to remind myself that it is an issue of "get to do" rather than "have to do." Teaching is a side-job for me, one I ply to make extra money--not because I have to have it to make a living or because I am in a position to be able to make a living at it. I have long since lost that possibility, although adjusting my mind to that loss and getting it right in my heart is taking far longer. It is, in effect, a luxury, albeit a strange one; it allows me to indulge habits developed through more than a decade and to accrue some direct benefit to myself through doing so.
Were I able to do this and only this, reliably from session to session and year to year, I might do so. Were I able to do it at the rates I currently do, consistently across terms, I probably would. But I know from long experience and from watching many, many others that I cannot count on continued work in this line of endeavor. I cannot be sure I'll have a job every eight or sixteen weeks, and I am not in a position where I can stake myself on that risk. The reward was never enough to justify it, really; I had simply convinced myself that it was as a way to help myself feel better about such privations as I experienced--and as I asked my loved ones to endure.
So it is that I keep teaching part-time, that I am allowed the chance to put to their direct use those skills I developed in the pursuit of being a knowledge-worker and proselytizer of the secular soul of spoken and written English. I know that I may not be offered the opportunity in the next cycle--indeed, I may never be offered it again. Yet for all the complaints I have about the matter, some of which have some substantiation to them, I tend to enjoy the work more than I lament it. Some of the students seem actually to open up to my view, and I appreciate the trust they place in me. Others introduce me to ideas I've not seen; they have them, I know, but they do not always share them, and I value those who do.
Some still show me the light of knowledge and understanding brightening within them, which vision is a dear thing to me. It is a thing I get to see in my beloved Ms. 8, and I love it in her, but I have seen it longer among the students in my classroom. It is a warm and comforting light, something I crave again and again. And so I work to be grateful to have the opportunity to have it shine upon me once more--and to get paid to kindle and bask in it.