Here’s a thing:

I taught today, full on teacher voice. Today, for the first time since I quit teaching at the community college back in December of 2001, it was my class. Today it was my lesson. Today they were my students. I work for an online teaching company, but I don’t really teach for them in the way that I did today in my internship. In my job I instruct, I advise, I tutor, and most of all I grade. I don’t give lectures, have discussions, interpret literature, make big intuitive leaps, build vocabulary, inspire connections and all those other wonderful things that I got to do today.


In the classes that I take I teach to my peers all the time. A professor from the summer is even having me back to do a guest lecture next week on the impact of the pre-Socratics on educational theory. It’s not the same. The preacher might practice in front of the choir, but that sermon is a dry run. Today was not a dry run. It was a small taste of that rare stuff, the stuff they keep behind the counter and only give to friends of bar on those infrequent rainy days when the only thing that will warm you is a short shot of the good stuff, today I had a shot of salvation. Who knows, maybe the house had a round.

Forgive the high handed rhetoric, I was teaching Thomas Paine.