I have been back in my teaching regiment for three weeks already.Today I felt one of those wonderful teaching moments where I thought, this has been my destiny. Of course, I am always a writer; I have been writing for four decades now, but if I had ever planned on making a living from writing, I would have had to move out of NYC, and probably out of the universe. Fortunate for me, I have a partner, since teaching is an undervalued and underpaying profession.
However, I always feel I have made a difference in people's lives and I would have to say, at the end of the day, I really like my students. I love teaching about writing and the arts, and my students respond accordingly. They often make me smile, sometimes make me laugh out loud, and often surprise me by how much they know-even about literature, art, culture, the world. I could say I am a professor when people ask me what I do, since I work at a university, yet I NEVER say that; I always say I am a teacher. I educate. I enlighten. I do not sit in an ivory tower, and never have. My comfort level is always on the ground, in dialogue and not monologue. This has been a good life, my life as a teacher, and if I had the opportunity to do it all over again, I would make the same decision. At the end of the day, how many people in my age group can say this?
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