Reflections on Forty Years of Teaching

As with most experience in life and with time, there’s been an alarming and more or less constant acceleration over the forty years I’ve been teaching high school students. Each subsequent year represents a smaller percentage of my teacher career, of my life, and this produces distortion and foreshortening. Among the various effects of this phenomenon (and I am far from the first to ponder it – one of my favorite books is, after all, The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann [a book that deals cogently with time compression – long, drawn out days and fleeting years]) is that I can recall my students from the first years more clearly than those from, say, five or ten years ago (with many exceptions). This can be unsettling and even embarrassing, since the ones from the recent past occasionally show up – at school, in the grocery store… .

A very short story that I think would make a great epitaph (originally coined by co-founder of National Lampoon Magazine, Michael O’Donahue) follows: “One thing led to another, and before we knew it, we were dead.” This “story” encapsulates my thoughts on life, time, and death, and it also captures our existential insignificance.

I have taught many wonderful young people. They have gone on to become engineers, professors (biology, anthropology, psychology, even chemistry), doctors and nurses, teachers, an advertising executive, small business owners, journalists, homeless people, grief counselors, authors, and suicides. There is something ineffable about this list and the way it flowed from my keyboard. However, it is crystal clear that I did not make any of these kids into who they became. Frankly, I doubt I had any influence whatsoever on the inchoate advertising executive, and I sincerely hope whatever influence I had on the homeless and the suicidal was in a positive rather than negative direction. I did, perhaps throw a switch that turned some of them in a particular direction – down a branch in their path forward among the very many branchings that they must negotiate in life.

A few of the aforementioned young people are my lifelong friends. I have attended and even officiated a few of their weddings, and some of my students are the children of my students (the first time this happened was weird, yet comfortingly circular). A handful of former students have become friends with my own sons (who are also my former students).

From my current vantage point, I have another year or so to devote to shaping other people’s kid’s lives. I hope to make the best of it, and I anticipate an eventual retirement that keeps me in touch with youth: my former student friends, kids falling in the circle of my volunteer efforts, my sons.