Year 6

“Day after day up there beating my wings
With all of the softness truth requires
I feel them shrug whenever I pause:
They class my voice among tentative things,

And they credit fact, force, battering.
I dance my way toward the family of knowing,
Embracing stray error as a long-lost boy
and bringing him home with my fluttering.

Every quick feather asserts a just claim;
It bites like a saw into white pine.
I communicate right; but explain to the dean-
Well, Right has a long and intricate name.

And the saying of it is a lonely thing.”

-William Stafford, “Lit Instructor”

This coming Wednesday I will walk into the classroom and start my sixth year of teaching. I came to this from twenty years of schlepping a camera around the world and spending long days and weeks in darkened rooms editing images and sounds and struggling to write content nearly completely disconnected from the world of clocks and calendars except for the ever present, looming deadline. Now my deadlines are much smaller, but come several times a day at the top of the hour.

I was never trained as a teacher. In fact, when offered this job, my brilliant teacher wife laughed out loud at the thought. I walked onto a university campus a trench slogging production dog and was proclaimed “professor” by provostial decree. Kinda like being knighted, I guess. It felt good to have a new title, but I had no idea what it meant or how to do anything with it. I thought I was going to have some coaching from expert peers but it soon became clear that they all had their plates full keeping their own set of colorful and important balls juggling overhead. So I dove in and tried to learn as I went along. Considering that I have to be pleased with what I’ve been able to accomplish, though by any objective teacher evaluation I’ve only been fair to middlin’.

This year we have a new dean. Not really having any idea of what a dean is supposed to do, I have thought that the guys filling the post during my tenure to date have been doing a fine job. But this new guy, whoa! I didn’t know what we had been doing without. Yesterday he came into my office (in work clothes, having been helping new students move into the dorms) and sat down. I had just come back from my annual performance appraisal with the outgoing interim dean. He gently told me he had been talking with his predecessor about my situation, poured affirmation over me as had my reviewer – I was doubly blessed in the same hour – and handed me a book he thought would be helpful. It is called “The Courage to Teach” by Parker J. Palmer. This morning I started a new chapter called “The Culture of Fear,” (ironic considering my entry here yesterday, though this a different flavor from a different direction) and the first thing he puts in it is the poem quoted above. I think for the first time I’m going to get some help figuring out how to do this job. The book is like a cold glass of fresh spring water to a dehydrated soul. I think just maybe this year is going to be different and better.