My friends and I have discussed several times how little support we had transitioning out of our corps experience, especially in comparison to how much preparation we had to set us up for success (the best that could be done, anyway). And sometimes the exit processing is much, much harder than we ever could have imagined—Ralph Williams, preparing us to study abroad my junior year, explained that after going abroad, we couldn’t go home again, because (although he phrased it much more eloquently) studying abroad gives you the gift of discontent, a sense of unease with boundedness and an attraction to the not-here.
The experience of returning from abroad has been written about often—that sense of restlessness and not belonging, and the sense of having left everyone you love behind not so much in time but in perspective. Given that I faced far more culture shock living and working in the rural South than I ever did studying abroad or traveling across Europe and Asia, it makes sense that I’ve had to search much harder for my place and my priorities after leaving the classroom. Luckily for me, if not for the people around me who had to deal with it, I began that processing the summer after my first year, and found in myself a level of anger, resentment, irrational emotion, and irritability of which I never would have imagined myself capable.
Recognizing that helped me enter my second year with much more perspective and with a much more acute understanding of just how transformative an experience teaching would be—not only would I develop strengths I never knew I had, but I would face weaknesses I never knew I had, in really ugly ways that ended up ruining at least one relationship. But, thus humbled, I was better able to build relationships with my students my second year, and to be much more forgiving and empathetic and loving, no matter how little reason they sometimes gave me to be so. It is perhaps this lesson for which I’m most grateful, among the countless others I’ve learned.
A large part of my ongoing processing, not surprisingly, has taken place through the written word. I’ve read books to compare others’ experiences to my own (In the Deep Heart’s Core, Relentless Pursuit, Teach With Your Heart), others in an attempt to seek Ivory Tower illumination of just what I was thinking (The Call of Service, Blessed Unrest, Sweating the Small Stuff, The End of Poverty, the psychological literature on helping, altruism, and emotional labor), and still others to be inspired by what those strong enough to stay have accomplished (Whatever It Takes, Work Hard Be Nice, Three Cups of Tea). And I’ve tried to reflect, at some level, here. Most recently, I read another alumna memoir, Taught by America, and while I can’t say I agree with all or even many of Sarah Sentilles’ experiences, viewpoints, motivations, or opinions, I did particularly appreciate a few well-worded lines:
“[My children taught me] that corruption and greed lead to calculated, intentional decisions that leave some children in this country without food and books and others with an abundance of both. That there is joy everywhere. That there is a hope that shimmers and shines in the most difficult spaces… that I am capable of deep love and of being loved. That systemic poverty is violent. That how and what we think matters… [the children] are the ones to whom I hold myself accountable.”
“My students used to ask me to read them the same stories again and again. And even though they knew the endings, they would always get nervous in the middle of the stories when things started heating up. What if she doesn’t say the magic spell in time? What if he loses the magic ring this time? What if no one ever finds her? What if he never comes back? What if, what if, what if? The possibility that things could be different, that things should be different, keeps me sorting through these memories, trying to arrange them in a perfect pattern so that some kind of meaning will emerge. I wanted to write a different ending, for me and for my students. I longed for an answer, a solution, a clear direction. But no matter how much I wrote and rewrote, arranged and rearranged, I was left with only fragments—missing teeth and textbooks, bullet holes and gunshots, laughter and light, hunger and abundance, shouting police and screaming children, images of children slapped and children held.”
I recently wrote a recommendation letter to my alma mater for one of my top students. That was a happy day.
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