Sustenance

I often find my energy fairly depleted come May. I was in finals for graduate school this week, my grades for the penultimate marking period were due Tuesday, and, in general, it's just a tiring time of year!

Despite this, I think that this week has had some amazing moments that made the frustrating ones all worth it. It's incredible to me how so very often those things that rob us of much our energy are also so fulfilling. On Wednesday after class, with my final paper passed into my professor's hands, I sat with some of the most fascinating and brilliant people who I have ever met. In celebration of the end of the term, we sat and talked for hours over cheap wine about everything from theories we read about in class to those identity forming experiences of our childhoods. Though I sometimes want to fling angry words of indignation at my computer screen as I sit down to write papers late at night after a long day teaching teenagers, it is those kinds of moments that sustain me.

Like graduate school, teaching is a profession in which you often exert a lot of energy and sometimes feel that it is not giving enough energy back. However, this week I also had another incredible moment of sustenance emerge. 

Teaching is the kind of work that demands and demands and demands like an insolent child. On a typical day, I am simultaneously re-reading at least two novels, all while trying to create engaging and accessible lessons for a group of thirteen to nineteen year-olds, who, frankly, have been sitting in hard, standard-issue NYC public school desks all day with home issues, school gossip, and very boring material obstructing their view of the education as empowerment vista. Then there is the emotional aspect of teaching. As you build relationships with students, who you sometimes see more than their own parents, there is the inevitable onslaught of emotional need that students require. Whether it's deaths in their families, neighborhood bullying, homelessness, abuse, or other heavy issues that I listen to with often helpless frustration, teachers are very often the first place through which adolescent pain is filtered. Beyond this, there is the high stakes testing pressure, the administrative pressure, the media scrutiny, oh and the fact that very few people who you encounter actually value what you do...

So I guess what I am saying is that it is because of all these factors--and others that I can't even begin to go into--that teaching is really, really hard. I am telling you this so that you understand how much it meant to me (and how incredibly renewing it was) to get a call from an old student tonight who had tracked down my number from a colleague who still works at my old school. Apparently, my old student has written his first book! It was published in mid-April and he wanted to tell me about his NYC book signing and find out how he could get me a copy. I can't even begin to capture in words the pride that swelled when I looked up his book on Barnes and Noble's website. 

But, the best part? The most incredible and renewing part? He dedicated his first book to me, his "high school English teacher who inspired [him] to be a writer." Yeah, I would say that's a pretty rewarding feeling. That, and I feel that I am going to gain major street cred with all future students if they find out that there is a young adult book dedicated to me about "four teenagers faced with a murder they did not commit." Awesomeness. 

I am also in love with the fact that he made me plural, adding an "s" to my last name, just as all my students always did at my other school. I never cared, but my colleagues always corrected them until, ultimately, it was merely a personal joke between me and oh about four thousand kids who would say my singular last name to me, but, in the presence of others, suddenly, I was plural. Yeah, I guess teaching can be pretty sustaining after all.