What does it mean to finish a career? I have a simple answer that may not resonate with everyone but it is to me a true statement about my career.
I think that, in first choosing a career, we are not just looking for a livelihood, but rather for a way to express ourselves in life. We need to express who we are and what we are about in our careers or it won’t work. I was certain that I chose the wrong career in becoming a language teacher so long ago, because all I experienced was how different I was from my colleagues and how it was nothing but a series of boring days that stretched into boring years, but I couldn’t figure out why and it drove me nuts.
It seemed as if all my colleagues wanted to do was deliver instructional services and talk about the mechanics of the languages they taught whereas all I wanted to do was love on the kids and make them feel that life was worth living and, dare I say it, have some fun. All my colleagues seemed so sad and it wasn’t long, a few weeks into my first year, that I too became sad, very sad, because the kids didn’t want to learn in the way I thought they would. I didn’t know it then and would not find it out for another 24 years, but it wasn’t that the kids didn’t want to learn, the problem lay in the way I was teaching them, teaching only to a few smart kids in each class I had.
Helping others know that life is worth living and that learning can be lots of fun and give, rather than sapping, energy, is to me a worthy career goal. I kept at it. I did my best on it. If I were to have just followed the leads given to me by my dry-minded colleagues in that horrible first quarter of a century in South Carolina, I couldn’t have continued. But something kept me going, a mystery that I can only thank, a mystery delivered by angels who work for the Sweetest One.
Leaving South Carolina and moving to Colorado, I was lucky to meet Susan Gross to see a glimpse of what is possible in language teaching. That glimpse into what was possible (stories, fun, meeting real people like the ones taking the trouble to read this right now, along with lots of professional fulfillment that carried into my private life), all that was actually a glimpse into my own self as the young teacher so long ago who wanted only to show teenagers (teens not unlike my bored self long ago at Culver Military Academy in Indiana) that life is worth living and that it can be fun. By becoming a teacher, then, I re-taught myself French (I didn’t learn much even after majoring in it in college) in the way that one re-parents oneself in life.
So with stories, almost fifteen years ago, I became instantly armed with the hope that my up-to-then boring career would finally honor my original goals in becoming a teacher – to become happy and help others become happy. I was able to get much closer to what I wanted, to my hopes and dreams, after I met Susan Gross.
In fact, my career has been nothing more than a series of hellaciously confusing up and down days that have all led me to one simple realization, that, through teaching French, I have done nothing more complicated than move closer and closer toward myself, toward expressing myself, toward getting to know and like myself more and more and more.
That’s it. That’s what I learned over the now nearly-completed 37 years. That’s what I wanted to say. It’s a story of self-discovery, of self -unveiling, of persistence, and of learning to love oneself through great trials and struggles, by loving others, even when doing that seemed too much, because of all the opposition.