The First Daze of School: My Fifteen Minutes

For those of you who have never been on the cover of a newspaper, let me tell you how it feels to be catapulted into celebrity. One day you’re living a quiet life in your medium-sized post-industrial town, and the next minute your picture is plastered everywhere, phones ringing off the hook, paparazzi in pursuit, women of all shapes and sizes offering to bear your children (“You work so well with kids!”).

(These things may not be completely true.)

What I can tell you I gained from the experience – besides sharing a broadside with Mike Nifong – is that some people view an appearance on the front of the local newspaper as the height of one’s ambition in life. One friend wrote to me:

I am so proud of you--I know the reporter could not believe her eyes as she watched those kids. You have really found your calling.

Although this is someone who I deeply respect, she is clearly out of touch with my personal ambitions. Granted, I have not seen or communicated with this person in nearly 6 months, but still, I would hope any friend would know me well enough to realize that my ultimate dreams lie outside of the teaching profession.

That phrase “You have really found your calling” for me conjures up an image of a priest receiving heavenly directives from God. Surely this is where the phrase is rooted, although in secular society “finding your calling” is more closely linked to finding and following your chosen career path. For me, it means an outward expression of that inward passion that drives us. My goal is to achieve a sort of equilibrium between the personal interests that I pursue in my free time (reading, writing, politics, history, Latin America, race relations) and my job, folding them into each other and blurring the boundaries between the two. Only then will I feel like a truly productive and fulfilled member of society.