“That depends,” said Caleb, turning his head on one side and lowering his voice with the air of a man who felt himself to be saying something deeply religious. “You must love your work, and not always be looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and learning to do it well, and not be always saying there’s this and there’s that — if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is, I wouldn’t give two pence for him” — here Caleb’s mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers “whether he was the prime-minister or the rick-thatcher if he didn’t do well what he undertook to do.”

(p.527 from the 2015 Penguin edition.)

King, Stephen. Stephen King on Writing. NY: Scribner, 2000.

Pennington, Michael. Hamlet: A User’s Guide. 1st Limelight ed. New York: Limelight Editions, 1996.

Loved Pennington’s book…so helpful.

“Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.”

“Oh, I have an easy life–by comparison. I have tried being a teacher, and I am not fit for that: my mind is too fond of wandering on its own way. I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for and never really doing it.”

Mary, early in book.

There’s a set of questions here, though: what happens if what you got into teaching to do diverges dramatically from what your school is asking you to do?

What if the kind of teaching you’re asked to do does not allow your mind to wander?

What happens when you want to create transformative experiences for your students and instead you’re being asked to drain their souls?

Eliot, George, and Ronjaunee Chatterjee. Middlemarch: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, and Contemporary Reactions, Criticism. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 2024.