After today we'll all be reminiscing about the days when all that was required of us on the first day of school was a paper titled "How I Spent my Winter Break." I for one think this is a still a valuable assignment, and even though a professor would never go for it, a columnist has no problem reverting to elementary school bliss.
Admittedly, my break wasn't anything to brag about. I spent most days on the couch alternating between "CSI" and "Say Yes to the Dress," living off of grilled cheese, chocolate milk and bite-sized Twizzlers. But when I wasn't marinating in sofa leather, I was spending time with old women. Twice a week, I'd drive over to my former English teacher's cottage-like house and have dinner with three women who all had a hand in my high school education. All in their late 60s, they seemed particularly interested in my opinion of Kindles and Lady GaGa. I don't really understand why they kept inviting me back; I wasn't familiar with the new teachers about whom they were gossiping and I couldn't really contribute to the ultra pleasant "all of our friends are dying" dessert conversation.
Yet every Monday and Thursday morning I'd get a call from Mrs. Mitchell asking me if I was allergic to whatever she'd planned on cooking that night. Eventually it felt less like an invitation and more like a presumption that I would be there.
Eager to hear three English teachers' thoughts about my college English classes, I tried to intrigue them with books I'd read and lectures I'd heard. They were suspiciously quiet whenever I went on gushing about rich prose and my favorite poets. Finally, one of them - a female Professor Snape who could silence a room simply by looking in a certain direction - looked at me and asked, "Do you want to be a teacher, Chelsea?" I was ecstatic. This was my chance to garner the approval of the woman whose only comment on my Emily Dickinson's "I Dwell in Possibility" essay was a scribble in the margin that read, "this dwells in mediocrity." I perked up and nodded. "Yes," I said. "I would love to be a teacher."
I expected cheers. I expected adoring smiles. I expected nothing short of tears and a toast to my bright future. They had passed on their legacy to one of their students and they should be proud.
But they weren't.
They spent the rest of the night giving me "advice," i.e. discouraging me from the profession I thought they'd proudly represented. Stay away from the Catholic school system. Stay away from the kids who need the most help. You like editing papers? Try doing it 150 times. Be prepared for a bad salary, bad benefits and bad retirement. Why not journalism? Why not editing? Why not pharmacy?
I left the house convinced that the future I had seen for myself was an impractical financial and social death sentence. If I don't even have the English teachers on my side, who's going to encourage me to be one? Distraught, I met up with yet another English teacher of mine - a 52-year-old Steinbeck guru with her own opinion on GaGa and modern technology. When I told her about the dinner with her colleagues, she laughed. "Don't listen to them," she said. "Mrs. Bricking cries at every graduation. She loves what she does. And you will too." And though my hope was not entirely restored, I did start thinking about the relationship between a person and her work. It's hard to see past the bad, and usually that's the part we broadcast the most to other people. I complain about the excessive reading and impossible essay standards, but every time I sit down to write a paper I do experience a tiny surge of excitement knowing that I'm about to do something I love. So even though this semester won't be nearly as relaxing as a "Next Great Baker" marathon, and even though my first assignment is a 12-page paper on the sonnet and not a paragraph about Christmas in New York, I chose this path for a reason. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Chelsea's column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at c.spata@cavalierdaily.com.
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