This old prof worries that he is merely a brick in the wall!

"I don't get no respect" I laughingly tell students. This punchline that I have freely borrowed from Rodney Dangerfield is to mask my nagging feelings of whether or not what I do is worth a nickel.

As it gets to the final phase of the term, every term, this inner feeling gets larger and larger because of the reality that I might never see most of the students again in any of my classes.  And rarely ever even on campus.  Would they have been better off had they not taken my classes?  Did the classes I teach add any value at all?  If the same class were taught by somebody else and not by me, would it have made any difference to the value (not) added?

Misery loves company--perhaps that is, also, why we write!  We hope to be a part of a support group where we can let it out. Yesterday, this essay was therapeutic:

For a few months, we are front and center in our students’ lives—or so we hope. They are the focus of our courses, our assignments, our examinations, our office hours, our meditations in the car ride home. We encourage them. We try to fill the gaps in their education. In some cases, we try to resolve the unique challenges that they pose to us (as well as to themselves), psychologically as well as academically. We modify our lesson plans and rework our syllabi. ...
And then it all comes to an end. Students leave, move on, transfer, graduate, and, quite often, we never see or hear from them again. And we are OK with that.
For us, the process starts over, and we soon find ourselves caught up in new stories, while the previous ones remain largely unresolved. ... We fill in the blanks about them based upon what we know (or think we know), and tell ourselves that their stories ended the way that we hoped.

This starting and stopping every term is often taxing--I never can figure out how much I want to be emotionally invested in the students.  What if I get carried away, and begin to even worry about their welfare, when they couldn't care?  What if I erred the other way around by not recognizing the behavior of students who want to cultivate a collaborative relationship with me?  It is exhausting to spend the energy and to then never know how the stories unfolded, and meanwhile having to start all over again with another group of students.

 I want to believe that what I do in the classroom matters on some level, that it has helped to shape their sense of the world and is responsible, in some small way, for their sense of self and belonging. 

Thus, with faith that it all somehow matters, we do what we do.  And learn to deal with the disappointments. And get excited when that rare student provides an affirming answer to whether it was worth a nickel.

No point talking about all these to friends who are dealing with way bigger problems in life. The age that I am in means that friends have their own problems and they are all much weightier than this for me to bug them!  Thus, I was more keen on listening to those far more pressing problems over dinner that a friend had cooked. And along with dinner I got a gift as well--a book of poems by Oregon's own William Stafford. I paused at a page; it seemed like the cosmos too, wanted to address my Dangerfield Complex:

Old Prof
By William Stafford
He wants to go north. His life has become
observations about what others
 have said, and he wants to go north. Up there
far enough you might hear the world, not
what people say. Maybe a road will discover
those reasons that the real travelers had.
Sometimes he looks at the map above
Moose Jaw and thinks about silence up there.
Late at night he opens an atlas
and follows the last road, then hovers
at a ghost town, letting the snow have whatever
it wants. Silence extends farther
and farther, till dawn finds the same page
 and nothing has moved all night, except
that his head has bowed and rested on his arms.
Rousing to get started, he has his coffee.
He sets forth toward class. Instead of the north,
he lets an aspirin whisper through his veins.

I don't feel the ton of bricks anymore. Maybe only a few!