On how to avoid despair

This week was tough in Averill Park. Suffice it to say, many of us feel a bit like ships without a star to guide us. We wandering barks have looked on tempests in the past, but the current one is more like a dead spot in the eye of a hurricane.

Many of my colleagues are beginning to ask very serious existential questions, primary among them: why am I doing this? Why should I care? What's the point? On a moment to moment basis I move between pragmatism and my old friend idealism. Pragmatist me has been winning of late.

The only solace I can offer them and myself is that it will pass. Having taught for almost a quarter century, I cannot easily answer the question my daughter offered up this afternoon: is this is the worst it's ever been? I can't remember it being worse, but I can't really trust my memory.

In the end, you can only control your own situation, and so I guess my advice is to continue to do what is meaningful to you. The things I've believed in still seem true to me, so I will continue to do the things that conform to those ideas. In my last class of the day today, I was leafing through my old copy of Knoblach and Brannon. For those of you did not do a masters degree on the writing side at SUNY Albany in the late 80s or early 90s, their book was the gold standard in the field of composition. Their first paragraph, which I read to my class (I doubt they got why I read it), demands of teachers that they be philosophers in the classroom, that they think about why they do what they do. That while they may be tempted to despair or tempted into the doldrums, every day should be a new chance to seek out the doing of things that conform to an intentional approach to the teaching of literature or composition.

It is important not to give in to abandoning one's principles and simply training kids in what is fashionable or comfortable or what sells. Being able to pull up a PBL document on a large screen is smexy in teacher world these days, but if one is doing such things to impress a principal or to satisfy one's sense that one has not become mired in the past, etc., let that go. Remember why you do what you do. I still believe that learning to be a great reader or writer comes when students are given a constant message: you are the author, you work within a real world on real ideas that must be taken seriously, writing to fill in boxes in an instructional plan is not learning- it is performing- it is dying.

So, if you want to avoid despair, return to your root principles- whatever they are, and like the Santiago you are, fight the fight. Go to the mattresses. Push the rock up the hill. It is all pointless in the end, but it's the only game in town.

References in the last paragraph (Hemingway, Puzo, Camus, Fish)