“Teaching isn’t work.”
At first, I
thought he was joking or trying to get a reaction from some of my peers,
standing around at the party. The
speaker, a farmer, was my age and was a friend since high school with one of my
closest fellow faculty members.
I soon realized it
wasn’t just a provocative statement, but a heartfelt belief. Thankfully, it was not a belief his wife, a
member of the school board, shared. He
wasn’t joking. None of my fellow teachers
reacted vociferously. It was, after all,
a party, not the time to start a loud argument.
Besides, we had all heard it before, many times during discussions with
the school board.
Someone asked
the farmer if he had ever tried teaching, say at 4-H (he was a big supporter)
or maybe Sunday school. “No,” he said.
“Why not? It’s pretty easy.” No, it wasn’t something he could do.
One lady
volunteered to contact the Sunday school superintendent of his church, also in
attendance at the celebration, and get him a job. No, no, no, he backed off. He wasn’t cut out for that sort of thing, he
assured us.
I could only
think of one thing to say to the farmer, a quote I attribute to Mark
Twain: “If you want to know how easy a
thing is to do, just ask a person who has never done it.” It didn’t make much of a dent in his armor.
Many years ago, Mad Magazine indulged in wicked
satire. One sketch I particularly
remember was a guy who went through several panels where he was caught
dumbfounded by something someone said. In reaction to each
incident, he told his wife, “What I should have said when he said that was. . .
.” Finally, his wife got tired of
hearing the same phrase over and over again and angrily told him he was a dummy
who could never think of the right thing to say at the proper time. Once again, he was dumbfounded. In the last panel, the couple was in bed, the
wife blissfully sleeping, the poor guy, bleary-eyed and wide awake lying by her
side, is thinking, “When she said that, I should have said. . . .”
I thought of
something I might have told my doubting farmer-friend too late. It was an incident from my youth.
It happened in
the early 60’s. My grandfather, Papa,
was living in the nursing home in Limon at the time. We were having some kind of a celebration
at our house that evening. Papa was in attendance.
I had spent the
day riding a tractor, a John Deere 4010, which was a nearly new tractor at the
time. It had many new creature comforts
for the time, a comfortable adjustable seat, super-sensitive power steering,
controls located conveniently. It lacked
an air-conditioned cab. It lacked an
effective muffler.
I arrived home, dirt covering me from head to toe. My
ears were still ringing from eight or nine hours of listening to the 4010’s
exhaust. I was tired.
I walked in the
door and headed for the bathtub. Papa
asked, “What have you been doing.”
“Working,” I
replied.
“What kind of
work?” he asked.
“Driving tractor,”
I replied.
“Driving a
tractor is not wo-rk!” He stooped and frowned, looking at me through his bushy eyebrows, to emphasize the seriousness of my error.
I looked at
him. He wasn’t joking. I thought about protesting, but what was the
use? I suppose I might have been a lot
more tired if I had been following a two-bottom plow pulled by a team of horses,
after all.
I took the bath
and joined the celebration, but I was disturbed to know I hadn’t been doing a
thing, not anything that could be called work, anyway.
Sometime after
the encounter with the teacher-deprecating farmer, I regretted not thinking
fast enough to tell him he reminded me of my grandfather. Since he spent a lot of time driving a
tractor, having the shoe on the other foot would serve him right.
He might have
asked if Papa ever drove a tractor. I
would have had to reply, “No, but what difference would that make? You don ‘t have to do a thing to know how
easy it is to do.”
Driving a
tractor is not work. Teaching isn’t
work. It’s a bit humbling to know I have
spent a great many of my waking hours in the last fifty-plus years doing things
that aren’t work.
What a life!
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