I once had dreams of writing witty, engaging content for this blog once per week. I guess I still nurse that fond hope. But obviously something about my strategy hasn’t been working so far: I believe this is only my fourteenth post this year.

The main reason for the slowdown is what it’s always been: my job. Teaching has been in many ways a wonderful career; in other ways, it has seemed like a wish I made on the monkey’s paw: I loved reading and writing, and so I thought that becoming an English major was a natural fit. And what better job for an English major than teaching community college English?

Little did I know when I was a 23 year-old teaching assistant that there would be weeks upon weeks of my job, year after year, where I would do nothing but read or write–and that none of that reading and writing would be for pleasure. I’ve probably read 20,000 student essays by this point in my career: many were thoughtfully written, and most were at least earnestly written, but not one of them was something I would have picked off of a newsstand shelf for fun. (Nor, to be fair, would my students have written any of them for fun). And every one of those essays, even the most slapped-together, carelessly constructed rush jobs, demanded that I write something real in response. By the time I get home most days, I barely have the mental energy to read the directions on a microwave burrito, much less read a novel, much less write one.

And yet, I can’t bring myself to quit teaching. I love community college students: I love their grit, their humor, their intellect, their disarming mix of cluelessness and commitment. I love seeing students ten or fifteen years later and hearing their excitement when they tell me that they still remember how to use commas around an appositive or that they never again started a conclusion with the words “in conclusion.” Often they remember things that I barely remember saying or things that aren’t really that important in the full analysis of what makes good writing. But some of what they remember is a kind of totem to them, and years later, they are better writers.

There are several weeks every term that I feel the fatal stroke or heart attack is just around the corner for me, that I’m just a day or two away from collapsing at the front of a classroom or dying with a stack of half-graded essays in my inbox. And then, every term (usually around finals week), the mental fog lifts again. I feel like I can go on for one more term, or maybe even for a whole year. I’m always reminded in those moments of the lines from the wonderful Jane Kenyon poem “Back,” which I believe she wrote about the lifting of a depression, but which I feel could apply to any teacher at the end of an academic term:

. . . I fall into my life again

like a vole picked up by a storm
then dropped three valleys
and two mountains away from home.

I can find my way back. I know
I will recognize the store
where I used to buy milk and gas . . .

Every day, I walk into class with the greeting “Hello, classmates!” or “Hello, knowledge seekers!” I try to present myself as though I were a wise, relentlessly optimistic trail guide leading them on their mystical journey through that ancient land of rhetoric. Some students surely must know that even thirty years into my career, I’m still faking it. But often enough, students take me up on what I’m offering: they follow along whether they realize or not what a sham all my optimism and confidence are. And some of them–many of them, most of them–finish up in a different place than where they started.