Redefining ‘Work’
by Jeff Birkenstein—Age 37—Lacey, WA
My students often ask why I became a college teacher. “I didn’t,” I tell them. Which confuses them, because they usually ask this in class. When I’m teaching them. Or, they believe this is what I’m doing.
I didn’t become anything, I say. Nope, just doing the same things I have always loved. That is, I read, write, ask questions, think, argue, travel, eat and, preferably, do all this while drinking in a good pub somewhere with good people. Add a classroom, subtract the drinking and”¦voila! College teaching in a nutshell.
I realized long ago that I would never survive this long slog through life working for a boss or being a boss or doing the 9 to 5 thing. So, instead I found me a 24/7 lifestyle. See, I’m always at work, whether stuck in traffic on the 405 near LAX, in my office meeting students, sitting in front of my computer writing or walking up Manley Beacon in Death Valley. Of course, I just use the word “work” for other people, for they tend to look at me funny if I use the word “fun” instead. For in America, it’s not considered polite to acknowledge the drudgery to which most people willingly submit themselves.
I asked a professor once about teaching literature as a profession. He corrected me with a smile that was both serious and devilish. Teaching, he explained, is not just a career: “I enjoy being at home with my family as much as I enjoy being with my students.”
I’ll never know if he was entirely serious about the relationship between family and teaching, but I understood him, nevertheless. And so do my students, when I tell this story. And yet here they are: in college to earn a degree so they can make X amount of money to buy Y amount of things. Sigh.
Yet, I trudge on. Why, I ask them, would anyone not do what they loved? And yet most of them will end up selling themselves for a whore’s pay to get away for a few three-day weekends a year. To Cancun. Or Hilton Head. Las Vegas. I know they’re afraid. Still, I have hope, ’cause they do get it. Be selfish, I teach them; follow your dreams. So I will go on being not a teacher but a learner and see what happens to the world.
4 Comments