Finding my mother in me—and in my classroom

The older I get, the more I love teaching. When I was starting out as a professor, teaching wasn’t my main concern. I was a good teacher, I’d like to think. I always put a lot of time into it. I spent hours prepping for lecture. I spent even more hours reading rough drafts of student papers and then grading them. I supervised dissertations. I was dedicated to the job and wanted to do it well. But these were secondary to my main ambition, which was to make my mark as a scholar and a writer. When I turned 50—that was seven years ago—things began to change. I became more careful about my time and relationship to academia as a […]