A brief note from seminar this afternoon.  We have all of our English students working on a series of readings and activities designed to get them thinking about their future.  Some of this is pretty typical English teacher stuff, but the hope is to get the students involved in their favorite texts — their own lives — and start thinking about how they will write their own stories.

Today we began by asking them to think about someone who is terrible at their job.   The goal was for them to write about this and then we’d have a discussion about the other kinds of workers, those who are good at their jobs.  The money part would be the conversation about why people are good or bad at their jobs.  If this part of the conversations went well, then the first assignment — writing a self-assessment — would make a lot more sense.   If you know what you’re about and what you like, then figuring out what to do with yourself will be easier.

And both groups delivered, offering some great insights.  The one that stuck with me was a young man who suggested that people are bad at their jobs because of stuff going on in their personal lives.   He noted that when people aren’t happy about their lives, they can’t be good at their jobs.

Such an interesting point, particularly in terms of education.   Teaching is such an intensely personal profession that it’s difficult to separate one’s real life with one’s teaching life.  Yet this student didn’t frame it as how a job might make a life tough; he framed it as a life making a job tough.

As a teacher, as a human, he’s right…if you’ve got your head on right, then it doesn’t matter what job you end up doing.   The joy I feel in my family, my home, my neighborhood, my friends, my garden, and my books can feel clouded by the difficulty of teaching.  But  if I let myself get too caught up in the dramas of my students’ lives, if I look at all the difficult parts of this work, if I see only the obstacles, then I won’t be able to succeed.   In other words, as this student points out, it would be about me.

Easier said then done.   Day two.