Bookaholic

I’ve spent perhaps thirty years focusing on the college market for publishing (after a career as partner in a poetry press. Rationally, I chose it as an easy market (to which I had sold a title by accident), with texts required in humanities classes, year after year.

But, just in the past few days, I’ve experienced the resurgence of a guilty feeling dating from my two years in the Peace Corps as a teacher. I hadn’t been trained as a teacher specifically, but I was eager to “help save the world” in whatever way I was needed.

The system, carried over from the British style of education, decreed that at the end of Standard Eight, students across the nation would take an exam, and only one-quarter of them would pass and go on for further education. Maybe I didn’t take it seriously enough, or understand the great pressure this put on abandoning regular classes so as to “game the system” by studying previous year exams, cramming, improving test-taking skills. Our performance was below average when the expectation had been that our presence would have increased the school’s chances. As I recall, seven of the 45 students passed. And perhaps the greatest injustice was that the head monitor, who had been head monitor even when he was in the Seventh Standard, did not pass. I was not invited to stay for the final quarter of schooling, though my roommate did stay.

I now believe that my intense focus on the transition from high school to college, which was also personally difficult for me, was compounded by my failure as a teacher. What would I teach myself, or students like myself, in order to succeed in education? What should I have known, or done, in Tanzania to help shape the lives of the students in my classes?

I’ve been content to step back from the classroom, and instead help supply the teachers with materials for that paradigm. Teach the teachers, teach myself. Does that work better? I can’t say. It does begin to explain to myself why I do these things, repetitively, over and over again. Perhaps that is my neurosis, or rut. Perhaps it is the meaning of my life.