I started teaching when I was 26. It was English 101 at the University of Kansas, a gig I figured would help me get through graduate school so I could cozy up with my real calling: writing. A funny thing happened on the way through the classroom: I was instantly smitten and soon discovered that teaching was just as much my real work. I regularly told my students, struggling with essay-writing on demand, what I told myself as a writer: Don’t think. Pay attention. Keep going. It served us all well.
This fall (starting July 1), after 64 consecutive semesters, I’ll take a one-semester leave from teaching I’ve taught through pregnancies and childbirths (although my children had the good sense to arrive either at the very end of spring semesters or in the summer). I’ve graded papers while balancing a nursing baby. I’ve lecture-paced across classrooms with a baby in a backpack. I’ve fit classes into kids’ school schedules, and later kept teaching because they were in college, and their part-time jobs, loans, and scholarships didn’t cover tuition. As the years unrolled, I taught through chemo, surgeries, my father dying, and later — right in the middle of a residency — Ken’s father dying. Teaching was the backbeat of my adulting and middle-aging tap-dancing and couch-surfing moves and collapses.
Because Goddard is a horse of a different color, I’ve been able to teach at this Vermont college while living in Kansas and sometimes in my PJs. I’ve flown and back forth for 11-day residencies to Burlington Airport, my heart always warmed by the sign on the hanger proclaiming “Green Mountain Boys 1776,” and my gut occasionally trembling when I read “flight delayed.” I’ve adventured in the high seas of travel, once even taking three days to get the right combo of flights after being overnight-paused in Manchester, NH and Laguardia. But the flying is a small part of it: I’ve attended 45 residencies that start with two days of faculty meetings, then lift up when the students arrive. While there are ample wonders, the pace is often exhausting, and only once did I arrive home without instantly getting sick.
Most of my Goddard work entails packets — reading long (like sometimes hundreds of pages for thesis projects) — packets of students’ exploration, research write-ups, creative work, studies, and other bells and whistles. My life has been doled out each semester in three-week intervals when packets land, and I’m off to reading them and writing each student a long-individualized letter, often on my front porch or in the living room, and across many a coffee shop, airport, doctor’s office, or other places I’m paused long enough to pull out the laptop and work.
Mostly, I loved it, even when I didn’t. Starting a conversation with a group of students when I’m sleep-deprived (oh, wicked residency insomnia!) often turned into a revelation for all of us. Beginning a packet when I was mildly annoyed by a student using “it’s” and “its” wrong always morphed in my heart melting and mind expanding at what they were unearthing in their lives and the world. Then there’s all the administrative work I’ve done over the years, which I didn’t love as much but brought me so much satisfaction in seeing what good could come from attention to detail, hard-won collaboration, and taking institutional leaps of faith (such as launching the Transformative Language Arts concentration in 2000, and very soon launching the PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies, which I’ve chaired the committee of for three years).
Why have I not taken a sabbatical, you ask. If only! The places I love to teach aren’t the sabbatical types unfortunately, so it’s been either show up and teach, or take an unpaid leave. This time, to my great surprise, when I was in the tub on Memorial Day, I suddenly realized, “I’m going to take a leave!” To my greater shock, when I sat down to see if finances would allow that, I caught up with myself: my subconscious has obviously been planning for me to take a leave because I’ve arranged all this extra work, some connected to the Miriams’ Well tour, and a lot more involving community writing workshops and the like. So I pulled myself together (truly), and started announcing, with great glee, that I was taking a break.
The world continues to give me green lights, but not “green-as-in-go,” more like “green-world-beckons-you-to-pause-and-just-be-with-it” lights. I stare into the magnificent Osage orange and cedar trees all around me, or up through this sycamore yesterday and exhale slowly. In three or so weeks, I’ll be caught up with the end of this semester (our semester officially ends mid-June), and I’ll lean back into the spaciousness of not teaching for a while. Then come winter, I’ll pack up my bags and happily march back into this work I love. I’ll tell myself: Don’t think. Pay attention. Keep going.
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