Why I Teach

I don’t know why I teach. It’s not that I’m chock-full of wisdom that I need to impart. Any facts I know a good reader can find in a book. And it’s not that I have a charismatic way of packaging ideas. I don’t. Sometimes I’m vibrant. Sometimes I’m a little tired.

I’ve had other jobs, and every job I ever had I cherished. Even so, I remember sitting in a small room where I typed eight hours a day for professors who were publishing scholarly articles, thinking that I’d like to trade places and try my hand at their job. So I saved money and went back to school and worked others jobs and did it. I got to stand up in front of my own classroom and write my own articles.

Since moving into academe, I’ve learned one thing about the teaching profession I didn’t pick up on typing scholarly articles. Teaching, or working in a college, involves more than a profession. It’s a way of life that consumes both heart and soul.

Last week, I stood in a circle with students from Emory & Henry College, where I work. The students were holding a vigil in honor of Virginia Tech. “This week we are all Hokies,” one of them said. That was true. At the same time, feeling their empathy for the slain students and professors, I never felt more like a Wasp.

For too many days, I’d been watching television and reading newspapers. I was shocked and appalled and a little angry at the same time I was comforted by the thought of heroes like 75-year-old professor Liviu Librescu, who saved the lives of students as he sacrificed his own. My head hurt. I wanted to shiver, and I wasn’t cold.

Listening to a student strum a guitar, I felt my head clearing to feel more like an unclouded day. I stopped thinking about the massacre. I thought instead about the week before, when I was depressed about something and a student I did not know noticed my black cloud and stopped me in the hall to joke with me.

I thought about another student who stuck his head in my office a few days later because I was coughing loudly. “Are you all right?” the student asked. “I’m okay,” I said. “Thanks for checking on me, though.”

Standing in the circle at the vigil, I saw students I had taught, students I knew from the halls and cafeteria, faculty and staff members and friends from the community who had stopped by. I saw these students and twenty years of memories of students lighting up my night like the candles across the way by the duck pond.

I watched the students hug each other and cry. When one walked up to hug me, to let me hug her, I knew it wasn’t because I had taught her something about writing. It was because she knew I had a heart, and I knew she had a soul.

Felicia Mitchell. First published in Washington County News (Abingdon, VA), 25 April 2007, p. A4. WCN is a publication of Media General Operations. Copyright 2007.