2 Conversations

Will Sartain--"Ask The Question" (mp3)
Josh Preston--"Question" (mp3)

Happy New Year, and welcome to the third calendar year of BOTG. I'd like to tell you about two conversations. Not long conversations really, just little snippets of talk, half-remembered by me or passed on second hand by a friend. In each case, I don't recall exactly what was said, so I'm reconstructing, but it shouldn't matter. The point will be the same.

The first goes like this: I'm sitting in a bar with a friend watching Monday Night Football, on a week when we really aren't interested in the game. And we're talking about careers and where we've ended up and all of that, and at some point, he makes a strange comment. He says, "So at some point, you must have decided that you were going to take a less intellectually-ambitious path." And he was presumably talking about himself as well.

The second one involved a different friend and a bunch of his students. He's taken them out to lunch and then they're going to buy Christmas gifts for a school charity project and, at the restaurant, talk drifts toward a young teacher whom they really like and admire. He's a dynamic classroom teacher, already a head coach, an Ivy League grad. The total package.

One student says, "He won't be here very long. That's for sure."

Another says, "Yeah, he'll be a headmaster somewhere."

Another says, "He's got too much going on to stay here forever."

And my friend, who has well over 20 years in at the school where we work is thinking, as these students who like him so much speak so baldly in front of him, 'what does that say about me?'

I also have well over 20 years in at this school. And I have reached that age where I know with absolute certainty that I will not ever be a headmaster. In fact, I know with the same certainty that I don't ever want to be a headmaster. What underlies the second realization is open to debate.

And, usually, my tendency here is to get defensive, to keep going after these issues from various angles of self-justification. But I'm going to try not to. Beware, though, that I may end up there anyway.

The truth is that teaching high school does not require the full use of my intellect. Some aspects of it are not particularly challenging at all, and I take it upon myself from time to time to try to create situations--new books, new courses, presentations, seminars, grants, etc.--that will give me a little something extra and push me in a new direction. But even that kind of self-study and exploration is kind of haphazard and possibly based on whimsy. Some of teaching is simply busy work.

The administrative side of my job requires even less intellect. Sure, there is plenty of problem-solving on a daily, or at least weekly, basis, but the problems are not particularly complex and the solutions tend to involve a reworking of logistics in almost every situation. We do not spend meetings putting the tenets of John Dewey to the test. Some of administrating is simply busy work.

I think that the reason I put the two conversations together in my mind is because I find it interesting to wonder about the combined implications. Was it expected, from the very first promise I ever showed in school, that I would seek a career that would maximize intellectual challenge? Was it expected that, once I chose the private school path, the only pinnacle I should seek was to become a headmaster? After all, I, too, was once the total package, believe it or not.

Education is my reference point, but I think these questions are relevant to a broader discussion. The context in which we see our work is bound to impact our attitude towards it. Did I have a calling to teach? I don't think so. I simply got to do some of it in grad school, and I realized, 'I can do this.' And it paid for some of my grad school tuition. And it paid some bills when I got married. And I thought it would leave me time to write novels. And then becoming an administrator paid more bills than being a teacher. I like being able to pay more bills. But I don't seek the dollars that come with headmastering.

But, that, of course, is not the entire story. It never is. And it doesn't keep the two conversations from gnawing at me. Nor should it.

The songs are available at knoxroad.com and slowcoustic.com.