Dear Students,

I have been ill since Friday night, and I hate it. I’ve eaten nothing in two days--can’t keep it down--and I am trying to care for my eight-year-old daughter who had the audacity to get sick at the same time I did, so I guess you might say this has not been my favorite weekend ever. I don’t even know if I will be in school on Monday--the odds are against it, as one or the other or both of us will likely still be sick. And I certainly don’t have enough strength to write a letter for you. But I do owe you one, so it’s off to the archives again!

This letter found daylight originally in 1997. Enjoy. :-)

I sit here exhausted (or at least bloody tired), trying desperately to finish grading a stack of papers so that I can figure out grades before they become overdue. You sit there having once more failed to receive the latest batch of your work from me (unless by some miracle--or the fact that I delay giving this to you--I have managed to finish them by now). As I have told you: you are not alone in being overworked and bewildered.

I have just finished an emotionally and physically exhausting six weeks with the play, I have dived from that into Forensics, ITS is going well and requires time, and I thank goodness I did not give in to the temptation to audition for The Fantastiks at Gorton. Meanwhile, my family (did I mention them?) do like to have me around every once in a while; and I have this small job to do in all of my spare time: I am a teacher.

Actually, I did not intend to be writing about that now. (Isn't the right brain an interesting thing?) What I did want to write about might be entitled perhaps "Revenge of the Four-eyed Pseudo-Hippie Intellectual Punks." Anyway, it would be yet another installment of excerpts taken from my authorized biography, soon available at book stores everywhere (as soon as I can find a publisher for it, at least.) (I just looked back at these first paragraphs and gasped. I believe that there must be demons inside my keyboard creating dozens of parentheses. Here comes another one.) Anyway, I think that I can manage to dovetail what I wanted to write with what my right brain is telling me to write about: after all, it seems to me that my choice of career is a part of my life.

So...

Why did I become a teacher? Perhaps the answer to that can best be stated by sharing a piece of another letter with you. A young woman in another class spent almost an entire letter (very creatively and with humor and with almost no parentheses) ripping one of her teachers apart. It was not me; I don't teach the subject she mentioned. She ripped this teacher left and right for being brilliant but unreachable (the "brilliant" part would have clued me in to the fact that it wasn't about me even if the teacher had taught English): she said that this teacher does not respond to questions, rambles endlessly without regard to whether the students understand, and does not "share her knowledge" with them. This experience, she said, was frustrating her, as this teacher "has the unique talent to take away every bit of intellectual ambition a student may have, and crush it within 2 or 3 short weeks." (Note to 2003 class: this teacher has since retired, but I’ll bet you could come up with someone to replace her with.)

I find this more sad than appalling. I have long since ceased being appalled by the poor teachers of the world, often brilliant men and women who, for some bizarre reason, have found their way into a profession that was never meant for them, or less intelligent men and women who slipped through the (exceedingly large) cracks in the requirements for teacher certification, or perhaps members of all intellectual categories who have simply become "burnt out" and are quietly waiting out the years until their retirement. Any and all of these people have the unacceptable side effect of hurting the students who have come to their classes for an education. But since that has been the case for so many years, I have become inured to it; it no longer appalls me. Like Macbeth, "I have supped full with horrors" regarding weak or abominable teachers. All there is left is to feel sad--for both teacher and students.

I became a teacher because I had two great English teachers early in my life (during my "formative years"). The first was in the sixth grade. Mr. Rossi. I have no idea what the man's first name was; I don't know if I ever knew it. But he was cool. That's the only word for it; the man was cool. He understood that too many other teachers made writing and reading seem a chore, and he did everything in his power to alter that. We wrote poems and songs (and even sang them in front of the class, which I did, in an act of courage not witnessed in my being thereto, and rarely equaled since). We wrote, directed, acted in, and even constructed sets for our own ten-minute James Bond film. (I was Secret Agent 006 1/2.) He encouraged us to use our creative (right) brains; the lesson stuck. In the sixth grade, I already knew what I wanted to be. If I could inspire the way this man inspired, I knew I could be happy.

The other teacher was Brother Dennis Rylands, a teacher I had in the 9th and 12th grades. Although he often bit off more than we could chew (like giving us Conrad's Lord Jim as high school freshmen), he always managed to get us to look at the literature, our writing, and our worlds in fresh ways. If I knew I wished to be an English teacher in sixth grade, high school certainly did nothing to dissuade me. And I suppose that I also owe something to the weak teachers I had in high school: the religion teacher in a class called "Death" who droned on and on until we wanted to commit suicide; the physics teacher who spent almost the entire year talking about the Boston police force, the Notre Dame football team, and the Loeb and Leopold murder case; the calculus teacher who showed up on the first day with the news that "I never even took calculus in college" and said she'd learn it with us--I don't think she learned any more than we did; the Honors Analysis (a kicky name for advanced trig and other such jocular proceedings) teacher who was also the yearbook advisor whom we detested so much that, on the day that one boy stole a test from his desk, everyone in the class cheated and got all the answers right; the gym coach (called "Coach Bob" for short, although he hated the class’ calling him that, for they always shortened it further to "CB," which in their lexicon also stood for "Cement Balls") whose idea of physical fitness began and ended with laps and pushups. These people too helped instill a desire to teach in me, for they made me recognize that there was a desperate need for better qualified educators in this country.

I never thought I'd get rich teaching, and I'm sure I won't (although I’m not complaining), but there are other measures of a person's success, and they begin with self-fulfillment. I could give you a thousand reasons why I teach: the freedom to be, essentially, my own boss; the opportunity for creative expression; the opportunity to meet and share thoughts with hundreds of (mostly) eager young people each day; the fact that every day is a challenge--you never really know what it will hold, and it's always something new; even the challenge (which I all too often lose) simply to stay ahead of my students' output. And of course there are the vacations; there are not a lot of careers where you get over four months of the year off, and I'd be a liar if I didn't say that this--the one real perk of teaching--isn't a biggie. But the best reason of all is you. All of you. And the pleasure that comes from doing what I do because it is just possible that it might make a difference. I have kept every letter that a student ever sent me after leaving my classes. (My one major regret in life is that, despite good intentions, I never seem to answer them; I am actually a lousy letter-writer, for I have precious little time. Thank god for e-mail: I actually do answer those.) These letters--mostly "thank-you's" for one thing or another, sometimes even "thanks for kicking me in the ass"--are essentially what I live for: I know that a teacher cannot always make a difference, perhaps not even most of the time, but when I find that I have, it's a high that can't even be described. It makes all the crap (the paperwork, the grading, the arguments with little Susie because she will not do her work, the arguments with little Susie's parents who can't understand why I don't just overlook this one shortcoming in their precious daughter, even the asinine principal I once worked for who told me, "I don't think you understand the philosophy of this school," and, when I responded, "Isn't the philosophy of this school to teach kids?" told me succinctly, "No") much easier to take.

Most things I do I do because I love them. I coached soccer for fifteen years because soccer has always been my favorite sport, and I have always enjoyed working with it from every side (coach, player, fan, ref). I act and sing karaoke because I am a ham and I enjoy being on stage. I write because I don’t think I could live if I didn’t. I direct plays because I get a thrill out of seeing my visions of the play come to life. I decorate my house because there, too, I get to create something of my own. And I teach because I love teaching.

That's all there is.

What else could there be?

Ms K