Here’s my advice–get a flu shot.

Also, wear a mask on planes.

Also, get a flu shot.

I have spent the last twelve days getting the flu and then recovering from the flu. It was not enjoyable. 

In fact, I wept a good deal of the time, not from the pain, but from not having the strength or savvy to hold my emotions back, as if emotions are dogs that wait at the door when you get home, ready to slip past your extended leg trying to keep them inside.

Our dog Remy does this. He hears our cars as soon as they enter our driveway, well before any human could sense them. He rushes down our stairs and his head pops in the low window that looks right out on the garage and driveway, as if he’s waiting for your order.

As soon as I open the door he’s by me. I’ll keep the garage door closed when I remember and he’ll run at it so fast he bumps his head against it. As it opens, he will crawl under it as soon as light shows, flattening himself and scraping his back against the seal on the bottom of the door.

I’m not sure my emotions were as anxious to get outside as he gets, but they sure seemed to be.

And once outside, they wanted to play. Remy runs to a spot on the lawn and waits for me to bring out the frisbee, his ears straight up in the air. That’s unless he sees a deer or a rabbit. 

My emotions saw that deer, and that rabbit, and a couple of squirrels. I couldn’t gather them up. I found myself crying at commercials for chicken sandwiches. I cried at YouTube disc golf videos. I cried at football games. 

Actually, that’s pretty common when you root for the Cleveland Browns.

I first knew I had the flu while my wife and I were in Seattle visiting my son and his girlfriend. I spent the entire weekend at a Residence Inn watching football, YouTube videos, and sleeping a lot. And weeping.

I got the chills and a fever and a headache. I ate a bit of soup and three crackers. And I wept.

I haven’t been sick in years, not since I stopped teaching public school. For those twenty-four years I got sick about once a year, at least losing my voice and getting a deep, raspy cough. I assume that was because I taught over a hundred students a day in interior rooms with poor air-handling systems.

Still, those illnesses didn’t release my emotions. 

You’d think they might–for twenty-two of those years I taught middle school. For the most part, that’s not where teachers-to-be want to end up. That’s not where most teachers-that-are want to end up. That’s not where most students want to end up. 

Middle school is not an end, of course, being in the middle, as it is, of primary and secondary education. It is, though, where I ended up, in my life as a public school teacher and a private school teacher and, for two miserable years, as a student from 1979 to 1981. 

Regardless of my health, I can still weep when thinking about those years. 

I remember an eighth-grade teacher giving an assignment one day in class to list ten friends. I couldn’t do it, coming up with only Kevin, Mark, and Chris at first until I listed my sisters, my cousins, and my dogs. 

I had moved away from Kevin the year before. Mark was simply a neighbor kid I’d never even talked to. And Chris was my friend from second grade who had passed away three years before from aplastic anemia. 

That was the year that I told myself no matter what, I would never become a teacher. 

Which is what many, many people are telling themselves right now, both teachers-to-be and teachers-that-are. In the past two days the New York Times has had two opinion section articles about this state of teaching, “The Great American Teaching Crisis” and  “Teachers Can’t Hold Students Accountable. It’s Making the Job Miserable”.

If you ask teachers of my generation if they recommend teaching to prospective teachers today, they’ll mostly pause, unless they simply say, “No”. After their pause, if they don’t say no, they’ll say, “Maybe”. You’ll be able to tell they are conflicted.

Ask them though if they’d go into teaching again if they could do it all over. Ask these teachers if, after thirty years of teaching, they’d go to college again and study to join the teaching profession. Even now, given the state of education reflected in the articles above. Even now as they yearn to retire and move on to their next adventures. 

Perhaps they’ll pause. But I’ll bet they’ll say, “Yes”. 

As I was cleaning up my office this morning I found the binder I used when I applied for my first job as a teacher back in 1994. Inside I found a poem I’d written as the answer to the assignment, “Describe, in one page, why you want to become a teacher”. It is dated December 11, 1993. 

All teachers have this assignment, sometimes called a Philosophy of Education or Statement of Purpose or Personal Philosophy Statement of the Purpose of Education.

Here’s a link to my poem. It’s not bad. I only wept a bit when I read it again. A bit at the sentiment. A bit at some of the poetic elements.

I also found this paragraph, simply called, “Personal Statement”. 

It’s the best I have to offer for why I became a teacher. It tells a story and ends with a punch. It’s better than the poem–short, specific, emotional. 

I remember learning to write this way, to take a personal experience and use it to draw a bigger story. It’s how I write now, how I think about these blogs, how I use stories from my own life to talk about things beyond my life. How I try to draw a tie between things that seem disconnected. How I try to end up with a final-line punch. A bow that ties it all together.

When I nail the punch and tie the bow, I can access the emotions I keep in check, even when I don’t have the flu. It isn’t that I don’t want to feel these emotions or pretend they don’t exist. I just don’t want them running around on their own outside, crossing roads and visiting people I don’t know that live down the street.

And I hope that I can help you reach some of your emotions too. Happiness. Sadness. Gratitude.

So, I’m wrapping this up. I can feel Remy behind the door. I can remember my despair while writing my dog’s names on that friend list. I remember crying at Chris’s funeral in fourth grade when I saw him lying in that small casket.

And when I read my personal statement again, I remember the passion I had to become a teacher. I remember the joy of making a difference for someone else. And the joy when they made a difference in my life right back.

That’s still why I write. Blogs. Poetry. Songs.

That’s why I need to get going now. I need to get the dogs outside and let them run.

---

Personal Statement

I want to teach because I want to make a difference in people’s lives. I have had many jobs: clearing tables, cleaning fish tanks, pouring coffee, mopping floors. I worked hard, and I earned money, but something was always missing. After my sophomore year at Manchester College, I traveled 1000 miles for the summer to a small camp in Vermont. There I taught my first student: Yutaka, a fifteen year-old, flamboyant young man from New York City. He paused before jumping in that first day, posed for the female campers, permitted a fish to swim idly by, then propelled himself in a macho arc into the lake. He seemed to lack grace, modesty, coordination, motivation, and most of all, swimming skills. He became my project, and I, ironically, his. I taught him the breastroke, and he taught me to talk like a New Yorker. At the last intercamp swim meet of the summer, as Yutaka toed the board in lane three, I yelled, “Swim silly-style, Chief!” and he proceeded to take second place, smiling humbly at the end. Now, ten years later, we have become close friends. We talk weekly on the phone – I counsel him and he counsels me. He now wants to leave his high-paying corporate job to become a teacher, he says, because he wants to make a difference in people’s lives. He asked me if this is a good reason. I told him it’s the only one.