Teaching
The first essay in my Introductory Composition course is always some version of a personal story. Sometimes, I do an autobiography, in the past, it's been a Literacy Narrative. But always something personal to get them started--most students tend to enjoy it because it's easy to write about themselves.
It's interesting because it involved a lot of disclosure on their part. Many tell stories about their families and where they come from, a great many of them talk about having made a big decision to move at one point and how it did or didn't work out. Rarely have I read one where I've been bored--I couldn't think of an example if you asked me to.
But every now and again, I read some of them and I feel a sort of wistfulness for a life I've never lived? I think about all the exciting and cool things my students have done and I think about some of the cool shit my friends have done and I just sit here, grading papers, trying to figure out how I can squeeze a single ounce of interaction or enthusiasm from my students (this semester they're thankfully pretty receptive). It makes me feel the really small size of my experience. I don't get to travel much and I've never actually lived outside of the state I was born in. My world feels so small and I feel that I wasted my youth (I probably did, but not in the ways I'm thinking here--a discussion for another time).
And I know on some level that's kind of bullshit. My own friends have told me how proud they are of me and how sometimes they feel like their lives are interesting enough. But, the frustrating part, for me, of being a teacher is that I am sowing seeds that I am unlikely to ever see bear fruit. In my almost decade of teaching (this is literally my tenth year), it's rare that I see students again after they leave my class. This semester, I have two students I had previously and it's because they failed last semester. So, I never see the fruits of my labor, in that sense. Sometimes, I will able to track a student's progress across a semester in a tangible way--it's often more difficult than you think--but not always. And that makes sense, three months is a tiny sliver of a person's life, though it may not seem it to kids these when they 're 18. But it's kind of something that's been floating in my mind recently. There's more floating in there on this sort of topic, but I'll probably swing back around to that another time.