Dead Poets and Career Choices (an ode to Karen Wallace)

In my family, the story goes that at one point in the early stages of my aunt’s adult life, an older relative informed her that she should never let a man see her sleep before they got married, since she snored. She should also never beat a man at checkers, apparently. I got my own dose of advice, from a different relative but along similar lines, while I was demolishing an unfortunate crustacean at a family crab-feed: that I should probably have something on paper with my beloved before I let him see me eat shellfish.

On the one hand, all of the aforementioned advice positively reeks of chauvinism and values of antiquated femininity, in neither of which I place much value. On the other hand, I am well aware that I (perhaps only surpassed in reputation by my mother) am the creature with which mommy crabs threaten their baby crabs to make them behave. Eating crab and lobster combines for me three of my most favorite things in the world: eating in general, butter in particular, and competition above all. I take just as much joy in picking every last ounce of meat from the crab as I do in enjoying the spoils. I’m not kidding myself about how such a sight might affect a potential suitor: I’m intimidating enough as it is. Perhaps it’s best to wait a while before we go out for lobster.

Self-awareness is a funny thing. While it primarily involves honesty, it also involves some other components. It’s kind of like the gin to a martini: essential, but incomplete without supporting ingredients. One of those ingredients—in the martini metaphor, this might be the exquisite, gorgonzola-stuffed olive—is external perspective: someone to reach in from outside and point out something that is obvious from a distance but less so from within the confines of your head (an extraordinary best friend is perfect for this; a therapist also helps). The trickiest ingredient is the ability to gauge how hard on yourself you should be; the vermouth of the equation: too much and you run the risk of a wimpy martini, too little and you can barely kid yourself that you’re enjoying drinking this jet fuel.

Many of my exercises in self-awareness are harmless and sometimes accompanied by the warm, fuzzy feeling of figuring out that some of my quirks aren’t faults. For instance: yes, consumption of shellfish should wait until the preliminary stages of a relationship have passed. Another realization has saved me a lot of money: an item of clothing may be simultaneous desirable and totally unrealistic. Sure, I may like it, but I’ll definitely never wear it, so put the credit card away, stupid. There are some movies that will make me cry—as in, bawl my eyes out with loud, messy hiccups—and so should be watched alone. Among these are: Armageddon, Toy Story 3 (a recent addition), Moulin Rouge, and Dead Poets Society.

The last of these movies (no, I’d never call Armageddon a film) was on the other night, and I stood paralyzed in front of the TV, watching the last scene even as my tea kettle was shrieking to be unplugged in the kitchen. As soon as Ethan Hawke starts up from his chair, stuttering about how he knows it wasn’t Robin Williams’ fault, the floodgates opened. By the time the boys are standing on their desks, I was a blithering heap.

I myself was lucky enough to have an O Captain, My Captain, in the form of the inestimable Dr. Karen Wallace. I hated her at first: she had a very low tolerance for bullshit, and as an arrogant high school freshman, I had a surplus. It eventually became a joke between us that at first, all I could hear was her saying to me that I didn’t know everything. When I stopped blustering and started listening, I could hear the other half of her wisdom: that no, I didn’t know everything, but ignorance is not lack of knowledge. Ignorance is refusing to gain more knowledge because you think you already have it all. Basically, once I realized she didn’t think I was a moron (which, in many ways, I was) and that she was in fact trying to help me, we became very close. I would come into her office when writing a paper (for any class, not just hers) and soliloquize at length on a completely disorganized heap of ideas, which were swirling around in my head.

She would listen patiently, and when I had worn myself out, she would ask, “What are you trying to say?”

Surprised out of my stream-of-consciousness, I would reply in the form of a thesis statement.

She would smile beatifically and say, “Good. Write that down.”

Throughout high school and college, I always began essays and papers by typing her words on the top of my brainstorming page:

What are you trying to say?

Good. Write that down.

Two things I know about myself are that I love the English language in its various literary incarnations, and that I love to teach. Karen used to let me take over small parts of the weekly grammar lessons, and when my enthusiasm at the chalkboard translated into someone’s understanding how an indirect objected works, I experienced a satisfaction that has proven to be difficult to match. Several years later, I gave a gallery talk in conjunction with an intern show I had curated at my college museum. I got the same rush as in freshman English: watching my explanation of a topic change the way people understood it.

One could logically deduce from all of this that I should be pursuing a career teaching English or art history. And believe me, I’m thinking about it. I think to myself that if I could just be one person’s Karen Wallace, if I could spark one student’s lifelong love for Fitzgerald or McCullers the way Karen did mine, that would be a career well-spent.

It is at this point in my thinking that my punctilious self-awareness clears its throat to get my attention. It may be fun to fantasize about a fulfilling, rosy life of teaching attentive, passionate students, but at a time when I need to be making real decisions about graduate school and how to afford such opposing forces as higher education and sustenance, I need to be honest with myself:

I would love to be someone’s Karen. But, truthfully, would that be enough?

The truth is that teaching is hard. At a dinner party I attended recently, a friend of mine commented dryly that she did not pass a day in her first several months of teaching without at some point bursting into tears. And she’s a lot more even-keeled than I am. I am someone who thrives on positive reinforcement, and I am abundantly aware that in most cases, teaching is a thankless job. Aside from ungrateful students, you also face hefty school politics, a tiny, fiercely competitive job market, and insane workloads. Thinking about all of these things, the rosy glow of teaching pales somewhat, and I find myself wondering if this is really something I want to pursue.

And so I face the vermouth issue. On the one hand, it’s possible that I’m not giving myself enough credit. Maybe I am tough enough to teach. Maybe letting myself give up just because something looks difficult is cowardly. On the other hand, I’ve learned the hard way that idealism is something very easily crushed, and that thankless jobs have indeed left me on the floor of my apartment in helpless, defeated tears.

It’s times like these that I find myself not so much “yawping” as “wembling.”

One of the things I have learned in (mostly) becoming an adult is that one often has to assign value to slippery, complicated things if one is to make any decisions. When I was choosing an apartment, I literally had to put a price on my preference for privacy. When I left my old job for my new one, I decided that losing sixteen months of hard work and walking away from valuable recommendations was worth less to me than working in the field I had originally set out to pursue. At some point in the near future, I’m going to have to decide how brave I really think I am, and how much realistic value I can place on the idea of being one person’s Karen, and many other people’s Just Another Lame Teacher.

One of the things I loved most about Karen was the combined power of her incapacity for bullshit and her immense capacity for kindness—kindness that inspired almost unreasonable patience with a pretentious student like me. I like to think she believed I contained multitudes.

What I have to do now is take my self-awareness and decide exactly of what those multitudes are capable.

(For fantastic coverage of English grammar from a real-live teacher, who has also faced the Dead Poets conundrum, please see Missed Periods and Other Grammatical Scares.)