Delayed Gratification

I just wrote an email to a former student who is now an English teacher. It ended with the line, "every day that you bang your head on your desk in frustration, know that years from now you'll get an email from a student saying that you've changed his or her life." It is comforting to remember how true that statement is. Teaching is a profession based on delayed gratification. It takes years for students to realize how much you care about them. I've been out of the public schools for three years now, and I still get facebook notes and emails from students. Two of my former students are English teachers(!), two more are gearing up for graduate school, and one who is still in high school wrote me to let me know that his reading skills have really developed, in part from being in my class. It really makes me miss being in a classroom. Somehow, I'm not sure being an adjunct professor, textbook author, or administrator can compete with battling in the trenches of a public high school classroom.

Or maybe I'm just a masochist. Whatever it is, I hope that at this time next year, the words "Dr. Broome" are stenciled above a classroom door (or, much more realistically, on the side of a traveling cart).

Besides, I love handing out stickers. I miss stickers.