As a teacher, you should be doing most of the stuff you ask your students to do. Here’s my first attempt at this essay.

Prompt:

“Let us not forget, after all, that there is always a moment when the moral choice is made. Often because of one story or one book or one person, we are able to make a different choice, a choice for humanity, for life.”
Please write an essay responding to Wiesel’s quote in 500 words or less. What story, book, or person has influenced your thinking about ethical decision making? What has it taught you about how you can participate as a caring, thoughtful citizen in the world around you?
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When I was in eleventh and twelfth grade I took four classes with Jean St. Pierre. Her reading list, her wisdom, her assignments are all the basis of what I do in the classroom today. One book stays with me and I give it as a gift on a regular basis: Albert Camus’s novel, The Plague. Set in an imaginary city in Algeria, the book describes the arrival of a disease and how the town folks responded to this threat. What I remember from this book is the growing sense that the world was collapsing and the desperation that develops when all is going horribly wrong. There were some folks who kept a kind of quiet grace in trying to meet their daily needs and to persist in trying to help the whole community survive. And there were others who crumbled.


I know this sounds remarkably unhelpful. And I wonder too about how this sad, sad book might be a source for a moral stance, one that’s lasted me the thirty-one years since I walked away from Bulfinch Hall. The first thing I’ve taken from it, particularly as I walk into my classroom each morning, is that part of a moral life is getting up and facing the work. We say it in our school, maybe too much, that the work is the work. What we mean is that you’ve got to keep at it, each day, that sometimes it’s glorious and fun and sometimes it’s just grinding through. We don’t live under Nazi Occupation nor have the rats begun to die on us a they did in Oran, but we are experiencing the impact of American poverty every day. The realities my students face, the injustices large and small, the world bound by policy and history, which, combined with their own adolescent choices, makes it hard to keep going sometimes. But I’m there and I’ll be there, and my presence makes a difference.


The second notion I’ve taken from this book, for better or worse, is to keep trying. To keep the daily ritual of struggle up no matter what. To keep addressing the problems in front of you, no matter how little impact you may think you’re having. To keep the small rituals of decency and kindness alive no matter what’s happening. To remember that the world is pretty much collapsing around you and all you have left are the actions you can take. You might live far from Oran and the terrors of the Plague; maybe you’re one of the lucky Americans who can live, work, and die without ever really having to see how poverty or injustice are woven into the fabric of American life. But Camus urges us to face this reality because, well, eventually it’s coming for us all.

I haven’t reread this book in ten years or so and maybe I’m totally wrong in my recollections. Maybe I’m giving to Camus what’s really due to Jean St. Pierre. Maybe those days of quiet deliberation in a seminar room were what forged this moral stance. Either way, I’ll be up in the morning, walking to school with a half-smile on my face, ready to try and remake our part of the world.