Borrowing Priviledges

"How are your kids settling in?" I was asked at an event to welcome American newcomers to Rome.

"I don't have children," I flatly stated.

"Oh," the questioner responded, a little flustered at her own sense of awkwardness.  She floundered a bit for what to say next.  It seems that for many people, children literally and figuratively fill social spaces.

Not typically known for my gift with small talk (I am the first to admit that I'm just horrible at it), I helped her out anyway.  I talked about my four-legged, furry children, and the conversation didn't go down in flames.

The funny thing is, I feel no awkwardness about this subject.

Oh, just chilling with a student and The Spouse under the Pantheon portico.

You can call me childless, or you can call me child-free.  Plenty of people take issue with either term. I don't.  The circumstances around anyone's status as either is fodder for others to explore or pontificate.

The matter-of-fact point here is that I am not an actual parent, and I'm not distressed about it.

As an educator of both high school and college students (who are now all ages, by the way), I have witnessed a wide variety of parenting styles.  I sometimes think that if my circumstances were different AND I could magically take the phases of my life and rearrange them, I would want to parent children after years-long observations and reviews of how how others do it.  Hindsight and all - it's beneficial. Many of you would probably agree with that.

Greece study abroad trip with university and continuing education students - 2010

Grandparents might say that in a way, they get that option - with limitations.  

Aunts and uncles and godparents might say that they get that option - also with limitations. 

I have none of those roles either. 

I don't see myself as an especially good candidate for them, as current parenting/child-raising trends seem to dictate.  I'm not much of a hugger.  I'm lean with praise.  I'll hand you a tissue, but would prefer appealing to your intellect instead of your emotions.  I'm terribly practical.  Students' evaluations of my classes and my advising capacities include things like 'sarcastic,' 'blunt,' 'not very sympathetic,' and 'demanding.'  

The upside: those assessments are sometimes balanced out by indications that the absolutely most important thing that is supposed to happen in class - or in the advisor's office - is actually happening. 

They learned something. 

In the Challenging the Food Pyramid (Reacting to the Past) game, a Health and Human Services character raises her hand to speak...

A little journaling outside Herculaneum, near Naples, 2012

Roman 'senators' plot and scheme in the Beware the Ides of March, Rome 44BC (Reacting to the Past) game

So perhaps I know my place in this world, as it pertains to other people's children.  

Here is where I will not go down the path of pithy sayings about the value of education or the educator.  I won't add to the already immense amount of dialogue out there about the nobility of teaching others.  I am struck sometimes by how polarizing that topic is, today, and I also worry a lot about the pervasive commodification of something I love and cannot personally quantify.  I cannot tell a student that her student loan debt isn't important.  I can only tell her instead that her education is the one thing that no one can take away from her.  I cannot justify the fact that for several years, legislative measures 'awarded' funding to schools that 'performed,' test score-wise, better than others.  I cannot rationalize the fact that many, many undervalued teachers in the States must take on extra means of income because their primary one - the one they pour so much of themselves into - does not garner a true, living wage.

I didn't choose to do this because I wanted to make a lot of money.

I think that -  despite my protestations to the contrary ('what will you do with these degrees?' they asked me, as I was earning them, "teach?" And for a little while, I said 'no.') - the profession chose me.

And while I've learned a lot from doing this for over twenty years, what I want to emphasize here is how this occupation informs me.  

Every day I perform the role of teacher or mentor, I learn more things about myself.

A specialist from the Atlanta Art Conservation Center visits my art history class and shares some thoughts about a 19th century American landscape painting in the University collection

They rightly call me demanding, but they may not realize that the person working to fulfill the longest list of demands is that aging person I see in the mirror every morning.  

They rightly call me a perfectionist, but they have no idea how much of that tendency I direct towards the work I'm performing.  I care so much about that elusive activity - learning! - that I am in fact monitoring *my* cultivation of it far more than I am judging them for not performing at some anticipated level.  Bad set of tests?  Pervasive misunderstanding of information or directions? I ruthlessly ruminate:  where is my culpability? If I can identify it, I will stubbornly tinker with that stuff until I think I've solved it...until something tells me that it isn't solved, and the process begins again. 

They rightly call me sarcastic, but they do not know how I want my hands-off approach to be a key to liberation.  They see me as both serious and funny, but they do not know how often I have been moved to pure and raw emotion at the sight of surprising growth, the revelation of insight, the joy of being engaged in the enterprise, their wonder at the world.  

The big self-portrait assignment..a source of much grumbling and eventual pride.

A big registrarial and curatorial project  from 'soup to nuts,' for two studio majors, finally installing the show in 2012 

The truth is:  I have the best seat in the house.

A Color Course group project underway.

And this is pretty simple stuff:  I just like knowing that I had some hand in those steps.  

A tableaux vivant for the endgame of Greenwich Village 1913 (Reacting to the Past) in an honors class.

A tiny but mighty group of travelers in the Paris and Belgium travel abroad group of 2014

decision-mapping a game character

a student presentation in the Capitoline Museum of Rome, 2016

I have been and will continue to be chastised by well-meaning friends for attempting to sustain this side of my life - even after having moved to a foreign city and it has been declared by The Spouse that I don't 'have to,' but I DO have to. It might be nice (for others) to be a lady who lunches, but I just don't function properly that way.  (I tried it one day, and it just didn't do anything for me). 

I thrive on this sense of purpose.  

I am admittedly pretty useless without it - in some fashion.

So today I want to thank all the people who have loaned their people to me. 

A last visit at the airport with an international student.

pizza and some laughs

A 'full-circle' person:  first a student, and later, a colleague.

A number of them have become friends, post-learning experiences or post-graduation.  I keep in touch with so many.  Sometimes they tell me what mattered when we were teacher-student.  Sometimes we just deal with the here and now.  And sometimes we still talk about futures - minus the office setting.

And if I really contemplate how massive and incredible it is that someone wants to know what I think, or what I might recommend, or what my opinion could be...or that I am entrusted with their thoughts, opinions and hopes...I am overwhelmed and can't put words around that feeling.  I poured a lot in, and got so much back out.  So much more than I expected.

I am confided in and favored and remembered and honestly, gifted with this growing collection of individuals who are remarkable and colorful and real.  It's a responsibility, yes.  And it's a big famiglia, and it turns out that it's the kind that I like.

When someone asks me if I have children, I say that I don't, and it's not a problem, because I teach other people's.  My adult life has been populated by an abundance of 'children.'

So, copious thanks to the parents and families and friends and partners who loaned their people - of whatever age - to me.

It was - and continues to be - a privilege.