Photograph by Patty Koller
IN RETROSPECT: A LIFE DEVOTED TO TEACHING By Jean Shervais The ancient Greeks got it right: the key to a happy life is balance in all things. Looking back on my decades of teaching adolescents, I’ve come to realize that it’s been a balance of many things that has kept me happy and content in teaching while many around me were becoming embittered or frustrated. Of course it’s also been a little luck, a lot of passion, and a certain joie de vivre. You say you’d like to know the secret to a long and happy teaching career? Well, I can’t promise that, but I can share a few things I’ve learned. As new teachers, we all have a passion for the subject we’ve chosen. Being a teacher of literature and the written word, I am an avid reader and writer and want to share what I uncover with others. The tricky part of teaching adolescents is that they are skeptical about whether that passion for a subject is justified or true. They have to be convinced. That means much of a teacher’s job is learning how to persuade others to give something a try. I realized early on that all of my students were not going to love Shakespeare with the same level of intensity that I do. That didn’t stop me from sharing my love of his masterful wordcraft, his sound plot structures, and his finely developed characters. For my students who preferred contemporary or futuristic works, I sought out well written modern pieces that could offer them the thrills in language or storyline to hook them into lifelong reading habits. And even for my weakest readers, I helped them to see that there were works out there worth reading to gain an insight on themselves and on the world around them. All experienced teachers share a secret: the kids keep us young because we learn from them everyday. Valuing our students and their youth and inexperience is one of the hallmarks of a good teacher. I have been fortunate enough to teach students of all ages, of many backgrounds, and of varying temperaments. Finding the balance in reaching all the students in a classroom yet keeping order has never been an easy task. I wrote the following poem remembering back to a day in my first year of teaching: