And My Light Flickers...

Well, time for the semester to begin, meetings and then classes and while I have had a restful vacation, it has also been minus my baby girl and minus something just as important, passion. For the first time in my teaching life (which extends for about 22 years, right mom?) I don't want t be a teacher, at least one at A&M. For the first time, I feel that there is nothing I can do to give at A&M, to a school, a creed, a ministry that I had previously wanted to believe in like I never had at my fabulous, big, authoritarian college. Yet, it has died over the last couple semesters and with it, my passion. It used to be that I let everyone in my classes because I believed what I was doing was important, that it was paramount for students to be in a classroom with high expectations, with a mastery orientation, with serious implications and a calling to the field that no one but me could give them. I was important to the teaching world of San Antonio in ways even they didn't know. I was changing the future, making it stronger, against the grain, powerful and smart. Now, I find the beginning of the semester daunting, dreary, and the passion I had once had in the ministry of education in San Antonio, gone. What am I to do? As I write these syllabi and post Blackboard, I find myself anxious and weary for the first time. I must say Im not sure I am a good teacher anymore. My light is flickering.

I also learned this last semester something that has induced much personal angst and perhaps jealousy. Jealousy I hate, but it has reared its head in vicious ways concerning this. I am not the chosen one, at least not one of the chosen ones and I want to be. One of the hardest lessons in my academic life concerns not being the chosen one, being told I am chosen, but actions not aligning, mine and other people's. It is realizing that someone(s) I wanted to be my mentor, my colleague(s), to deem me smart, and to want to make my life better, has chosen others, but not me. And, what is worse, I am jealous. I don't want to be, I want to say it is okay for me not to be the smartest, to be chosen to work with, write with, but I am and now, at this crossroads in my life, the lack of an active mentor has crippled me and I feel dead at the university, left to rot. What is worse you ask? That I don't want to play the game anymore. Let me rot.