This morning, after making a purchase at the JCCC <C> Store, I dropped a handful of change into my pocket and experienced the odd sensation of coins running down my leg. Like Ringo Starr in Yellow Submarine, I had a hole in me pocket. As I struggled against years of habit to remember to place keys, pocketknife, and change into my left pocket, it occurred to me that this experience could be a metaphor for my life. Perhaps I reached this conclusion more easily having just paid for two children’s tuition and books. One of the truths of teaching seems to be that while we will not starve, we will generally not grow wealthy either. The money flows into our pockets and then seems to disappear, perhaps tumbling down our legs and bouncing from our shoes.
Before I made it half way back to my office—but after stopping twice to pick up something that I still seemed determined to carry in my useless right pocket—I recognized the limited nature of my life metaphor. Everybody whines about how much they’re paid, regardless of how much they’re paid. Somehow I imagine that Oprah, while eyeing that $48,000 handbag in Switzerland, mulled over the injustice of her place on the Forbes list. Surely I could find in my leaky pocket a more profound message than this.
Unfortunately, I determined as I mounted the stairs in GEB, for many of our students, my torn pocket is a metaphor for education. They see themselves dropping time, energy, and money into a hole designed to keep those things safe—in fact to allow those things to grow and reproduce. (Okay, I never said this was a perfect metaphor.) Their investment, their change, seems to drop into the top of the pocket and then tumble away never to be seen again. Of course, many of these same students invest the time and energy equivalent of loose change when they engage in our classes, but if your money seems destined to be strewn about the floor, wouldn’t you rather it were a handful of pennies and nickels instead of a wad of Benjamins?
What I would love to show my students, however, is the way that pockets and loose change are supposed to work and how they relate to education. Digging in my right pocket now I find—oh yeah, there’s a hole in it—but there is thirty-seven cents in my left pocket, thirty-seven cents that will buy pretty much nothing. Similarly, the fifty minutes I spent with my Comp II class this morning hardly changed their lives in profound ways. No one left the room this morning thinking, “Wow, that changes everything.”
Most of the time, education is an incremental thing. Personally, I cannot point to particular moments in particular classes and say, “Wow, that changed everything,” yet over time those classes (and a host of other educational experiences) did change me. Bit by bit, a nickel and a penny at a time, education dropped into the pocket of my life. It didn’t seem to amount to anything at the time, yet over time, it accumulated. After a while, I could trade in my coins for a dollar bill and then a five. Gradually, I became capable of buying something with those pennies and nickels.
For me, life as a teacher is not a life full of “eureka” moments. I’ve never knowingly conveyed the single secret that unlocks a richer and more rewarding life during the span of a fifty-minute class period, yet I am persuaded that those educational pennies and nickels I contribute to my students, as well as the dimes and quarters that their efforts bring to the endeavor, have made a difference in countless lives.
It would be fun to have the job of passing out giant checks for Publisher’s Clearing House or to do some other dramatically life-changing work, the sort of stuff that people can remember for the rest of their days. That’s not my work, however. My work is slower and more incremental. My work is not writ with lots of zeroes and a dollar sign but with a steady accumulation of humble coins, an accumulation highlighted by my torn pocket. The other life would be nice, but it’s not my life. But that’s okay. Education, and my life in it, is about change.