Be It Resolved

I'm not a big believer in New Year's resolutions, but since I actually managed to keep two of them last year, I thought this might be a good time to take stock of how they affected me.

Last January I was feeling at a loss over what to do with myself. I knew that I could not teach at the University of New Mexico because I was taking a three week trip to Chile in the middle of the semester, but I couldn't imagine not working at all.

So I resolved to do something I'd never done before, and I began substitute teaching at my son's high school. The results surprised me: I had never taught at this level before, and I liked the rapid give and take of a high school classroom.

Unlike my college classes where students are often much shyer about speaking in front of people they don't know well, these kids had no problems talking, sometime too much. And they weren't shy about asking for a “study hall.” “No way,” I told them. “They're not paying me to babysit you.” There were groans, but they usually gave in with a good grace.

For a class on poetry, I started by asking the students to write down one thing they liked about studying poetry and one thing they didn't like. “Analyzing the symbolism to death,” was the consensus on the negative side. So I had them first study the meter and sounds of Emily Dickinson's “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” rather than looking for deeper meanings, and many of them were able to find the symbolism on their own.

At the end of the class, one girl looked at me in surprise and said, “No one's ever asked our opinion like that before. Thank you.” Those are the moments that make teaching a pleasure.

My second resolution was to start writing this blog, and that too has had surprising results. I hadn't done any writing for pleasure since I finished my book nearly ten years ago, and I was worried about not being good at it any more.

I also hadn't followed many blogs, and I had no idea what the “style” of a blog was supposed to be. So being the inveterate academic that I am, and I went to the library and checked out a book on the “best blogs” and found that it was pretty much the wild west on the blogosphere: hardly any rules applied.

Finally, consoling myself with the thought that probably no one was going to read it besides my friends and family, I put up my first post, “Why me?” followed by 66 more posts.

To my amazement, people actually read it. I received many comments (more offline than on) from friends, family, and people I've never even met.

Writing this often can be hard. I worry that I'll run out of things to write about, and then I read something, or hear a story on the radio, or my kids surprise or vex me, and there I am off again to my laptop to blog about it. Becoming a regular writer again has not only given me a voice, it's also brought me great solace and a deeper understanding of who I am.

So what lies ahead for 2009? Check out my next blog.