Our birthday month often seems like a special month to many people. Thinking about one's mother, one's father, about our life up to this point, all give us a moment of focus on ourselves. Other friends and family remind us of our birth anniversary, and we usually have to endure egregious singing and more attention than we're used to and more nonsense than we really feel comfortable with. With a little luck, the Curmudgeonly Professor will reach his 76th milestone on September 17, a day that I have always thought was my own personal property. When we were children, we had little or no money, but mother always made me a cake with a thick coating of brown-sugar frosting. Our birthday candles had to be quickly extinguished, since we had only one set and they had to be used for all of the birthdays in our family throughout the year.
Perhaps even more than a birthday month, September is the back-to-school month. I know many kids now start school at various times throughout the summer, but for me, for nineteen years of attending school, and for another forty years of teaching, September has always been the significant month on my annual calendar. For elementary school years, a new lunch pail, new school supplies, a new teacher, new classmates, new blue overalls for the first few grades, the long rides on the school bus--all of this newness in our life offset our loss of summer freedom. And whether I was going to school and taking classes or whether I was preparing each fall for my first college lectures of the year, I never lost my enthusiasm or love for school and classes and students. Even after teaching for many decades, I remained nervous and apprehensive before I started each class, knowing that anywhere from 30 or so to the 400 students in my large sections would be testing me, evaluating me, deciding whether they were going to listen and maybe whether they were headed for a drop slip after class.
Now I can only think about what it was like to begin school in September. Even now, I would rather be back in front of a class than sitting here in front of my computer writing and reminiscing about school. I can hardly go anywhere without encountering one of my former students. My son Ron spent a few days in the hospital this week with blood clots in his lungs and leg. His pulmonologist, it turned out, was a former student of mine. He told Ron that he asked me once in class (he was an M.D. when he was in my class) what good economists were since they were always making new assumptions and changing their minds. He told Ron I gave him a good answer that he was satisfied with. Of course, economics is the fountain of all wisdom in all forms. Former students are in my neighbor-hood in the South Salt Lake Valley and scattered throughout Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, and wherever they migrated after college. Some are still angry over grades given years and years ago. Most remember stories that I told. Only a few claim they really liked economics. At least two of the latter students got Ph.D.'s in economics and are now on the faculty of the Marriott School at BYU and in other universities.
I would like to continue teaching because the insights I have gained since I retired would change my approach to teaching. When a teacher retires, about the most one can say is that we realize, finally, how little we knew and how much we need to learn. We also learned to take almost everything other people said with a grain of salt, since knowledge is a work in progress, an evolution from what we used to understand, to what we now understand, to what we might discover tomorrow. And a good part of what we hear is limited in reliability from missing information and bias. Learning to sort all of this out is the primary task of teaching and learning.
But most of all I miss the students. I miss the anxious freshmen just turned loose from their parents, many experiencing the first real freedom of their lives. I miss their youth, their bright and shiny faces, their smiles, and even their gripes. I know they are living in dorm rooms and apartments that are blights on environmental sanity, consuming horrendous kinds of food, checking out the girls, checking out the boys, texting mommy and friends, putting every new thought or experience, consequential or inconsequential, on My Space or their blog. The latter activities are new since I retired, and I am thankful I don't have to deal with them. I miss knowing instinctively when I have had a really good class, when I have clearly explained material without a lot of protests and hands asking for further explanation, and when students actually stop up after class and, amazingly, even thank me and tell me that we had a great class.
Whenever I started a new class, I looked at my students and my thoughts turned to their parents from all over the country and even from all over the world, anxious for the welfare and performance of their children, many struggling beyond their means to help provide a college education for their offspring. This responsibility places an enormous level of trust on a teacher, to do a decent job, to be fair, to make sure that one teaches what one is supposed to teach. After I taught for many years, I found myself getting a bit grouchy and short of temper with the little darlings. Then, one day in class, I looked out across the sea of faces, some dozing, some alert, some taking notes, some taking stock of the gorgeous girl sitting in front of them, and I suddenly realized that I really loved those kids. Ever after that moment, teaching was no longer a chore, but an enviable occupation, one that I cannot imagine ever trading for any other.
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