To Teach June 16, 2021

Following the ordeal of architecture school, I intended to take off six months to recover my energy and to chart a course for my future, presumably one that involved an actual job in architecture. But the advent of COVID and its staying power edged me into a suspended state of inaction. 

I used the lull to reflect on the arc of my life and how I might best and productively employ whatever time I have left. I started to notice that my intellectual interest still lay in science, not architecture. I came to appreciate what a uniquely good fit science was for me and considered how I might exploit my expertise. More and more, teaching high school science or math emerged as a path forward, and I applied for a few positions in private schools (as public schools require a teaching credential). 

I was drawn to high-school teaching as a job worthy of my diminishing time. I remember one of my daughter’s elementary school teachers passing away (after 23 years on the job) and thinking to myself, “That was a life worth living.” During my stint as an interviews editor, I noticed a recurring theme of my interviewees, namely, the influence of a high school science teacher. I, too, had been strongly supported by two outstanding math teachers. 

Luckily, this spring I was offered the chance to help out with the science curriculum in a local high school, and I grabbed it. It was indeed as good as I had hoped for, with friendly and encouraging colleagues, students alert and ready for business, and my own mind stimulated. Coincidentally, one of the biology teachers opted not to return for the fall, and suddenly there was a real possibility of joining the faculty, including the opportunity to develop my own curriculum in advanced biology. Stay tuned.

Blind on one side, deaf on the other April 12, 2021

Yesterday I made it to the front of the serpentine, single-file line at the neighborhood Whole Foods when the man behind me started yelling and gesticulating. “The cashier up there is waiting for you!” he vented in a Scottish accent. “What, where?” I asked, ashamed that I had missed whatever visual or acoustic signals the clerk had sent. Even though I was on alert, I simply didn’t catch on. 

It was an old-lady mistake, one I pride myself in not making, but the aging body is starting to let me down. My vision is cloudy as a cataract obscures my right eye, and my hearing is impaired from repeated damage to the left ear. I’m just not ready to commit to lens replacement or a hearing aide, but I see it is folly to ignore the problems. 

The experience was yet another sign that I am not as equipped for even the little things in life as I once was. My decline has been haunting me for the past few weeks as I have been helping out at a local high-school, where diffident students struggle to communicate with me, their masks muffling their sound and depriving me of the visual backup of lip-reading. 

I have become my father, in fact. He was blind in one eye and deaf in the opposite ear. I can see now how these deteriorations, though neither painful nor life-threatening, can erode self-confidence and eat away at connection.