The Perks of Teaching

One of my regrets about Losing My Faculties is that I feel like I may have been too negative about teaching. I wrote it during a bad time in my life and so may have put too much emphasis on the low pay, the chronic disrespect, the incompetent adminstrators...well, you get the idea. 

So here, by way of trying, in an albeit very small way, to balance the scales a little bit, is a nice teaching moment I had yesterday.

I walked out of my office and over to Downtown Crossing.  Where I saw one of my former students getting ready to perform some Christmas Carols.  We said hi and had a brief conversation, and I decided to hang out and watch the show. While I was standing there, a bunch of my current students walked by.  They said hi and we exchanged jokes, and I felt good about that.

The concert began. The performers were really talented singers, and they were really doing a great job with the Christmas carols.

And then I saw another former student from another school standing at the edge of the crowd and went over and said hi to him and had a nice conversation and listened to the music.

And I thought, well, this is a really cool thing about teaching.  All the bad stuff is true, but it's also given me the opportunity to meet and interact with a lot of really interesting people.  People who, when I bump into them randomly on the street, I'm glad to see.  And who are glad to see me. (or at least pretending very skillfully, which is fine too.)

So, yeah, I've chosen a profession that's never going to make me a lot of money, but in that moment, seeing students from three different jobs at more or less the same time, well,at the risk of getting too George Bailey about the whole thing, I felt rich indeed.