"Summer Teeth," Wilco
Sometimes my job is excruciating. Sometimes my kids challenge my patience and push my limits and break my heart. There are kids I worry about, kids I get frustrated by, kids I get angry at, and kids I feel sorry for. But most of the time (and at the risk of sounding like a sappy cliche), teaching is such a reward. My students crack me up, make me proud, challenge my intellect, and amaze me every day. It's the week before Thanksgiving break, and I'm feeling pulled in a million directions, buried under thousands of essays, and utterly exhausted. I'm ready for a break. But then something like this happens: I come home from a run, and before I make dinner and dive into grading two class sets of independent novel assignments, I Google "East of Eden excerpts." Because I'm teaching it for the first time in the spring to my Honors sophomores, and I should probably, you know, read it before then. And this passage comes up as one of the first links:
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is the one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
And then it really doesn't matter that I'm tired, and overworked, and underpaid. Because THIS is the stuff I get to read, and analyze, and share with other individuals on a daily basis. I get to make a living by enjoying and discussing Steinbeck. I get to hear kids respond to the epitome of masterpiece prose and intellectual stimulus. The essays and the dog-ate-my-homework-and-my-printer-broke excuses are totally worth it.
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