"Are you an educator?"

Getting back home after the conference in Los Angeles was not a straight shot, thanks to flight delays.  As I waited in line to get my re-routing done, I couldn't help but think that the young woman ahead of me looked familiar.

But, as a middle-aged single guy there was no way I was going to creep her out by asking her cliched lines like "hey, do I know you from somewhere?"

Thankfully, I didn't have to pull the remaining hair out of my scalp trying to figure that one out; I overheard her tell another woman "oh, I go to Western Oregon."  Aha!

"No wonder you looked familiar to me" I told her with confidence.

"Yes, I was in your class three years ago" she replied.

It is one small world after all!

A few hours after that, I was in the small plane in the last leg of the journey when a young woman sat in the aisle seat next to me.  She reminded me of another student who graduated about two years ago.  Could this girl be her sister?

"You look so much like a student I had in two of my classes a couple of years ago" I said.  "She was a redhead though."

"Oh yeah, where at?"

"Western Oregon University is where I teach."

I barely finished saying that when she said with excitement in her eyes "I am a student at Western."

What are the odds of running into two students from the small university where I teach!

As we chatted, I shared with her the interaction with the other student, and added: "I have to make sure that I am on my best behavior when I travel then."

It was quite a struggle to wake up in the morning and to head out to work after having crawled into bed only at one in the night.  But, I did.

After classes, I swung by the grocery store before going home.  I was hungry--a bowl of oatmeal was all I had eaten the whole day.  The middle-aged checkout clerk smiled as she asked me "are you an educator?"

Even as I replied with a yes, I thought "educator" was a better word than "teacher."  I like it.

"Why did you ask?  Did it flash on my forehead that I am one?"

"You just looked like one.  It was your demeanor" she said with an even wider smile.

If it is in my demeanor, then it is all the more important than I watch my behavior when out in the public.

Before the day ended, I decided to finish the essay in the New Yorker with which I had a tough time because it was all about music and piano and everything else that I am ignorant about.  But, I worked my way through.  And, I hit the mother lode when I read the following sentences in that essay, Every good boy does fine:

When you give ideas to students, they tend either to ignore them or to exaggerate them.  The first is distilled futility, but the second is grotesque ...
One thing no one teaches you is how much teaching resembles therapy.  You can be working with a student you've recently met, and you begin to tinker with one thing, even the movement of an arm.  It becomes clear that some important muscle has been blocked for a decade or more.  It's an intimate thing, being shown these years of lost possibilities, and before long you're giving advice about boyfriends, and explaining why parents are such a drag.  There are diabolically opposed incentives, too: while the teacher is trying to express the truth about the student and discover what isn't working, the student is in some way trying to elude discovery, disgiosing weaknesses in order to seem better than she is.  In this complicated situation, a teacher must walk a thin line, destroying complacency without destroying confidence. ...

 I have listened to students talk about their boyfriends and girlfriends, their stories about their parents and grandparents, their travel adventures, their unpleasant encounters with the law ... Yes, whether it is music or economic geography that we teach, we have to walk a thin line.  A very difficult walk that nobody can really teach us how to do.  We learn to do that by reflecting on our own experiences.

Ninety-percent of a teacher's job is directing students to read what's plainly on the page. The other ten percent is attempting to incite their imagination about what's behind and between the notes, what could never be written down anywhere in any score--and sometimes this seems unteachable, like the creation of life itself. ...

Oh, if only I had the capabilities to articulate the ideas like how those sentences have been crafted!

Sometimes you wish you could go back and ask your teachers again to guide you; but up there onstage, exactly where they always wanted you to be, you must simply find your way.  They have given all the help they can; the only person who can solve the labyrinth of yourself is you.

I am an educator!

My final day as an educator in California