20190830.0430

As I round out the last day of one job and take up the mantle of another--my promotion takes effect at the end of the business day today--I note that many of the people who remain in the profession I sought to enter have met with their new students for the first time this week. It will be a while before I have another set of them of my own--I would seem to be coming upon an off session for the teaching I still do--and I still remember fondly some sets of students I have had, who early distinguished themselves as engaged in learning and whose conduct through sessions and semesters bore that out. I miss it (though not nearly enough to leave off the work I am doing now in favor of returning to teaching as my primary job).
Seeing the comments friends and acquaintances of mine are making about their students and the shared enthusiasm, I am reminded of the flatly intoxicating experience of learning going well. Gaining new knowledge, fitting it into what I have already known, and figuring more things out as a result of that joining--there is pleasure in such things, deep and abiding pleasure that is not done in a moment and leaves no sticky mess behind it, carries no threat of disease or illness in the mornings to come. And there's no small joy to be found in guiding others to such pleasures and seeing them revel therein.
Seeing such comments, too, I am reminded of how seldom I have had such moments with my classes. Perhaps it has been what I have tended to teach--classes required but that are perceived (incorrectly) as having no bearing on what the students seek to do--or perhaps it is because the students who have complained about my (lack of) teaching skills have been correct, but I have not often found myself in the position of turning students on to the kinds of things we are doing, not often found myself leading them to enjoy the work I am obliged by institutions to have them do. Or maybe it is the fact of obligation, itself, that hinders it--but I think it is in me, as others who are similarly obliged and constrained seem somehow to do better about it.
Perhaps, then, it is a good thing that I do no more teaching than I do anymore. Perhaps, with the new job, I should look to draw myself further out of that line of work, be in the classroom less and in other places more, and let others who are excluded even from part-time contingent academic work by my presence in it and who might be of better service to students have the space. Certainly, I do not have the poor ratings in my current position that I have in the one I sought to hold before; I'd not be about to advance to head my organization did I. And maybe I ought to be more content with it, focus on it more fully, and not seek to be what I should long have recognized being told I would not be able to be.