What We Do

One day last week I asked my dad about work. He's a jack-of-all-trades type, putting in his working time at an industrial supply company.

"Do you go home after work and think about things that you should've gotten done, or things that you should've done better, or just about work in general?"

"Oh, yeah," he said, "All the time."

I'm a teacher by trade, and I'd like to dispel any myths out there about how teachers are super-duper lucky to be in the profession we're in because we get all that time off. We might indeed be lucky, but the time off isn't the reason. I'll speak only for myself when I say that school is constantly on my mind when I'm not in class, though I'm sure my teacher friends would agree. "Time off" doesn't really exist.

I don't know why I was a little suprised when Dad so easily responded to the affirmative to my question. He's not a lazy guy; to the contrary, he might work too hard. Then he said, "I think anyone who cares about their job or has a sense of integrity about it thinks about work when they're not there."

Makes sense. Maybe this is why, when I was in college and working a thrift store, I cried out of frustration when an old woman wanted to use her buy-one, get-one-free coupon on silverware. She had a bag of matching silverware, sold all together for $4.99, and a handful of loose unmatching silverware, priced at 19 cents apiece. She couldn't understand that if she used her coupon, she would get one piece of silverware for free. She wanted the entire handful of loose silverware for free. A stickler for the rules, I wouldn't do it. The woman got downright pissy with me, but I didn't budge, and neither did my manager when she had to be called up. At the time, I didn't realize that people who act like assholes to retail clerks do so because they are beat down, literally or figuratively, in other areas of their lives, and clerks are helpless strangers on whom they can vent their frustrations. I didn't realize that it actually didn't matter if the old lady was mad, or that I didn't get paid enough to care even if she was. I didn't know that in the big picture, my trift store job was a matter of convenience, not life or death. All I knew was that I had to go back to the break room after she left and cry, because she was yelling at me as I was trying to do my job (and do it well).

So it should come as no suprise that I worry about my students and their successes and failures. If the old lady at the thrift store made me cry, I can and will think a lot about teaching, even when I'm not in front of the class doing it. And Dad's comment about his work shouldn't have surprised me, either. Some people glide through their jobs, effortlessly putting in their eight hours and then going home without a second thought of it. That's not Dad, though. I see the hard work when I stop by the folks' house at night, in his face, in his hands. Yeah, he doesn't leave work at work. Maybe that's okay, though, because what I see is not just worry, but also integrity personified.