And time should gurgle on

I've talked about this before, but it bears a revival.

Of all the various hats I've worn over the years (including coffee drinker, boy rejector, guacamole zealot, and Growing Pains aficionado), nerd or teacher's pet have to be the oldest and most enduring. I've been a good student since the day my mom dropped me off at preschool and told the teacher that I already knew how to read. I always desired the respect of my teachers and worked hard to convince each of them (those flawed people who were arbitrarily given influence over my life for exactly one academic semester) that I was a competent human being. I never tired of the challenge, and for some reason was eager with every new class to prove, once again, that I had a brain and due respect for grammar.

There are two common ways of viewing the stilted student-teacher relationship: Some recognize it, eventually, as a confining and semi-irrational system and are glad to be rid of it once they've jumped through enough hoops to earn a degree, and they move on to a job where the system of measurement doesn't exclusively depend on kowtowing to an opinionated authority figure. Others get a sort of high from the positive feedback of authority figures and, when pushed into "the real world," sorely miss an environment where feedback was direct and personal, and where success was easily measured in percentages and grades.

Obviously, (even as an adult) I belong to the second class of students. I sometimes wonder if my being in grad school isn't simply a product of me being addicted to positive feedback.

Earlier this evening, I was reading through some of my old undergrad essays, trying to find the name of a book I'd referenced. (I always saved the final, physical, graded copies of my papers, for reasons I never consciously knew, but I figure it must have something to do with mistrusting my computer.) I quickly got sucked in and began reading my entire folder of graded essays from my sophomore year. At some of them I naturally cringed, but overall I was impressed by how much information they contained. And how much I'd already forgotten. I evidently wrote with sass and conviction about subjects I couldn't pick out of a lineup today.

What really caught my eye, though, was my professors' comments. Those essays presented me with textual history of living, breathing professors who cared about my brain--about my writing style, wit, and ability to form a convincing argument. These people spent time providing scrawling, blue-ink commentary, specifically designed to help me be better at life. Notes that I found unfair in the heat of the moment (or gratuitously complimentary) I now recognized as valid and productive--attempts to reinforce or improve my writing ability and capacity for fair and critical thought.

My entering into a PhD program in the Humanities, believe it or not, came with a monumental dose of self-doubt and guilt. (Why aren't you doing something more useful with your life? What does literary criticism matter when people are starving or oppressed? Are you trying to escape the real world? Do you think you're too good to have a normal job like everyone else?) But I think I'll finally be able to set aside one such nagging question: I'm not simply in it because I like hearing professors tell me how good I talk. I'm in it because I want to be one of those teachers whose positive esteem I so sorely craved, whose blue notes I nostalgically admired today. At this point (pawn of the system though you may call me), I can appreciate the fact that I desired my teachers' approval not for approval's sake, but because they were smart, invested people who had valuable insight that would help me grow into a better (or at least better-spoken) person.

I want to help people like that. Or more accurately, I want to be that all-powerful, arbitrary authoritative figure for a future generation of coffee-drinking, boy-rejecting teacher's pets and authority-hating, hoop-jumping non-academics. Regardless of whether they appreciate me in retrospect or run away from me with glee after graduation, I like the thought that I'll make an impact.