I had a clear plan: I would return to college to complete the last two years of my bachelor’s degree and get certified to teach journalism. I had spent my adult life so far as a freelance journalist writing feature stories for magazines, but the pay was sporadic and poor at best. I needed a steady job and decent benefits. Surely I could transfer my experience to the high school journalism classroom.
But I had doubts. I was already 38 years old with a husband and two children. Would I be able to keep up with the younger students? Would I look silly being in an undergraduate college classroom at my age?
“I’ll be 40 when I graduate,” I moaned to a friend. “You’ll be 40 anyway,” he replied.
So I gathered up some student loan money, bought my backpack, and became a non-traditional college student. There weren’t a lot of us in the early 1980s.
Two years later, predictably at the age of 40, I had finished all the class work and had only to complete a student-teaching semester. I was assigned to an eighth-grade English class at a local middle school.
Maybe it was because I had my own eighth-grader at home at the time. Maybe I tried too hard. Maybe I was just too tired. Maybe I wanted the students to like me too much.
It was a disaster. The students didn’t like me, I didn’t much like them, and they had all the power. “Get me the hell out of here,” I said.
Way closed with a slam and a thud. I was a failure. Teaching was not my call after all. There I was with my shiny new degree and no place to go. Two years of hard work for this? If there was a light at the end of the tunnel, it was the train coming toward me. Had it all been a waste?
But the nudge to education did not leave me. I went back to school – again – this time at the graduate level, and earned a master’s degree in communications. It qualified me for something i had never thought of – teaching at the university level.
I returned to the university of my birthing, this time as a teacher instead of a student. I was hired to teach Freshman Composition in the evening division, where the students were in their 30’s and 40’s – students who also were going back to school. My students were the ones who had not passed the required English test when they entered the university. The late bloomers. The ones who were enrolled provisionally.
I loved teaching them. And I was good at it. At the end of the semester, every one of them passed the dreaded re-test.
I was a teacher; I just needed an older audience.
– Marjorie George
Questions for reflection.
“Each of us arrives here with a nature, which means both limits and potentials,” says Parker Palmer. “We can learn as much about our nature by running into our limits as by experiencing our potentials” (pg 41-2).
When has way closed for you? What did you learn from it?
“When I consistently refuse to take no for an answer,” says Palmer, “I miss the vital clues to my identity that arise when way closes – and I am more likely both to exceed my limits and to do harm to others in the process ” (pg 43).
When have you met your limits? How does it feel to accept that? Are you able to let go of things that are not yours to do?
Palmer confesses that, “It took me a long time to understand that although everyone needs to be loved, I cannot be the sources of that gift to everyone who asks me for it. There are some relations in which I am capable of love and others in which I am not” (pg 47-8).
What do you think of the idea that you are not capable of loving everyone? How does that square with our Christian beliefs?
Palmer speaks of burnout as trying to give something we do not possess. We want to help someone but it is beyond our ability. It is trying to give from nothingness. “When the gift i give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself – and me – even as I give it away” (pg 49).
How do you know when something is not yours to do?
More resources
Sound of the Genuine
Howard Thurman (1899-1981) was a theologian, mystic, educator, and civil rights leader. In this piece he teaches how to find the genuine in ourselves and in each other.
https://www.dailygood.org/story/1846/the-sound-of-the-genuine-howard-thurman/
The Wisdom Years 