The Blogging/Teaching Parallels

When I was 19, I had been working the writing lab at my community college for two years, and two incidents (perhaps I will share those in another entry one day) opened my eyes to one simple fact: I had to teach. I had spent years casting about, heavily medicated on as much as 240mg of phenobarbitol per day for my epilepsy (for which I still take Depakote), searching for a career.

Some people I knew had always had plans for careers, and in almost every one of those cases the plans worked out beautifully. Sadly, when one is on CNS depressants, planning a meal, much less a life, is a chore. In a way, my current difficulty echoes what I faced in those early and middle teen years, though I think the worst thing that my medication does is take the edge off of my emotions, leaving me rather flat except when I am in the classroom. My highs and lows, because my medication is also a mood leveler, are not so high and not so low.

Back to my story, though. I discovered something. It was not so much that I wanted to teach as that I needed to teach. The terminology I used, first with myself and later with others, I have come to learn is something many have used before me. I teach for the "lightbulb moments." Do you remember those silly cartoons in which the characters suddenly got a great idea (usually quite a stupid one, but entertaining for, not in spite of, that fact)? A little bell would ring, and a lightbulb would appear above the head of the character. Silly, right? Not so much.

I learned to spot the moments at which students suddenly grasped previously incomprehensible concepts. "You can hear and feel commas?" Yes, you can. Try it some time. Something, and it isn't a twitch or a smile, no; it's something so subtle I have never found the words to describe its physical manifstation. Well, yes, I have. It's as if a light were suddenly striking the visage of the student, illuminating him or her in some soft glow on knowledge. The power to guide someone there is more addictive than any drug I have ever heard of. I suspect that business executives and artists have similar moments, but I was built to be neither, nor should I be anything else that may have its equivalent. I must teach. I seek out those moments every time I step into a classroom. I find them less often, but they are there.

Blogging has a similar effect. I am not taking knowledge and matching it to people. Rather, through communication with people I have never, nor will ever, meet, I can effect change. I expected to brighten a day or two when I took a little extra time to hunt up what email addresses I could of people whose sites I had selected for links. Little did I know that in catching myself up (I have three more to read in toto to be all caught up) on these, I would find multiple comments, and beautfully written ones, on one site to which I had linked from another to whose site I had linked. I was floored. I was giddy. Even my medication could not take the edge of the joy I felt at having possibly helped join to souls divided by billions of web pages.

My relationships to my students are precious to me. I have only had one student ever so upset with me that she chose not to acknowledge me as she walked by, but then again, hers was one of the situations in which a passing grade was unavailable due to plagiarism (someone seems determined to try every semester, despite my best attempts to warn against it). Likewise, the ideas, or more precisely the minds behind those ideas, expressed in blogs are precious to me. If by chance something I do helps, so much the better. Sunshine, creator of That's Life, has given me pause to consider my own situation (and it is perfect since she shares her name with my wife). Her own musings on her previously neglected urge to paint gives me hope. I can only pray that her future posts will shed further light on how she found that outlet, much as I hope I will find my own.

Blogging and teaching, to deliver on my title, are similar in that they are both about making real connections. I don't mean necessarily between one blogger and another, though that may well happen. Rather, I mean between the individual blogger and his or her lost or missing self. Mine is out there, some place inside of me. Now, if only I had a map to myself, I might find it all the sooner.