Hard struck

I was reading an excellent piece yesterday in Harper's Magazine where the author insisted, despite the assertion of technocrats who worship the bottom-line, the humanities are as indispensable to a free society as the sciences are supposed to be to a strong economy. As someone who has always been a humanities sort of gal, I found it to be an elegant and timely credo. And for a moment it felt like 2001 again.

Though illness was increasingly frustrating my ability to do so, that year found me spending my time reading about pedagogy and interdisciplinarity and the history of liberal education. I was working on a paper about the potential of interdisciplinarity to save liberal education after a conference on higher education accepted my proposal. The acceptance letter even addressed me -- gloriously mistaken -- as "Dr."

And then the flashback ended. I remembered that I was here. In 2009. Listless in my pajamas. Using my bed table to hold the weight of the magazine as I am too weak to do so. Arguments about the value of the humanities and the state of American education were suddenly vague and remote. That's when it struck me and struck me hard: I'm no longer a teacher.

When I was seven and spending a week with my grandparents in their smokey cavern on the Coastal Range while my mother had ear surgery, I can remember asking my grandma under a brilliantly bright sky what a teacher does. I can't quite remember her answer now -- funny that I can remember the smells and sensations but not the substance of the memory -- but I then replied that I wanted to be a teacher. Over the years the type of teacher I wanted to be changed (elementary, secondary, missionary, college), but teaching was the consistent core of my vocational aspirations.

Will I ever see a classroom again?

Friday will mark the eighth anniversary of the day I handed in my resignation as a graduate assistant in our university's general education program, University Studies -- well short of my ultimate career objective of being a tenured professor. To be sure, I did a lot of teaching, if not about my subject of research (but then, who ever really does teach about their research?). Just as my fingers were starting to brush against the prize, the illness swooped in and dragged me away to its hellish lair.

Yes, I know. I am not unique in watching my dream drop off the horizon along with the daylight. And it's not even like I haven't cried over this loss before. Grief is funny that way. Or rather, capricious and arbitrary that way. Smacking you like a two-by-four across the head when you're not expecting it.