Address to 2021 Graduates

 Today some former students contacted me, telling me they had just completed the AP Latin exam. They wanted to thank me for the role I played in getting them to that point. It was touching to see that, even though I bailed on that career choice after only two and a half years, I had still made a lasting impact in the lives of some great kids.

That got me feeling introspective about my decision to leave teaching in December 2019 and about the life I’ve led since.

It had me wishing I could make a speech to that graduating class of Latin students, an opportunity I gave up when leaving halfway through their junior year. I realized I could still write it out, and, hey, maybe some of them will read this after all.

Salvete, discipulae carissimae,

Don’t worry, the rest of this is Anglice.

When we met in August 2017, it was your first day of high school. It was my first day of having a job.

This may come as a surprise because I made efforts to seem like I was an old hand in the classroom. The first time I met Sister Therese, may she rest in peace, was when she gave me the advice “Don’t let the girls know this is your first year! You’ve been doing this for ten! We have nice girls here, but not that nice. Tell them you’ve been doing this for ten years.”

I may not have told you explicitly that I had been teaching for ten years, but I was careful to never acknowledge my inexperience. I referred to my few intense months of student teaching in college as “when I taught at Central.” I tried my hardest to exude confidence.

In reality, I doubted almost every day whether I was making adequate decisions, whether I was modeling the lofty ideals of “best practices” in language teaching, whether I was living up to the other Latin teachers I saw posting their amazing ideas online. I spent hours agonizing over what activity to do next, when to have the next quiz, whether to explain this grammar concept now or later, whether that should be a correct answer on a test, how many columns should this project’s rubric have. I didn’t get home until 6 PM, I was in therapy for anxiety, and my friends were worried about me.

Despite all this, I persisted, and I succeeded. I know I succeeded because you all succeeded. The day I wrote your Latin 1 finals was a great day because I was astonished at how far you had come. I was impressed just by imagining what you would be able to do on those exams. And you all didn’t disappoint. You never disappointed me, and even if you did, it’s not important because I don’t remember it.

Two and a half years later, I had little doubt that I was a kickass teacher. I was good at my job, my students were good at theirs, and I was respected by my colleagues and administration. So, why wasn’t I happy? Coasting through the next 45 or so years of my career until I retired in glory?

Every morning, I stood on the Spring Garden station of the Market-Frankford line, looking wistfully at the Delaware River. Wouldn’t it be amazing to work outdoors in nature’s splendor? I listened to an interview one time with the founder of Burt’s Bees and dreamed a reality where I, too, could live in the fields of Vermont, beekeeping with an eccentric old hermit named Burt. I was jealous of my partner’s sisters, one a park employee at Denali National Park, another an environmental educator in Appalachian Ohio. What if I could have lived a different life, a life like that, in tune with a lifelong love of nature and the outdoors?

I already considered my life to be settled, a decision made and finalized. When I was 16, I decided I wanted to be like Mr. Rodkey, my high school Latin teacher, and essentially stay in high school Latin class forever. I chose which colleges to apply to based on whether they had an education and a Classics major that I could double-major in. Temple University offered me a full scholarship to do just that, so I moved to Philadelphia, leaving everyone and everything behind to pursue my goal. And pursue, I did, doggedly, with never a second thought, a glance to either side. Possibilities did not really exist for me. The decision was made.

During my last semester of college, I interviewed at a small Catholic girls’ school that a classmate from Temple advised me to apply to. She was an alumna of this high school and knew they were looking for a Latin teacher. With several months left before I even graduated college, I had secured the dream: a job in my field directly after college. Everyone I knew marveled at my success. A steady career job at Nazareth Academy High School, offered to me when I was only 21. That was that, life was decided, now I only had to live it.

It turns out, having your entire life figured out and settled in your early twenties may not be all it's cracked up to be.

So, in December of 2019, I made the hardest decision of my life. I decided my life was not a foregone conclusion. I could make whatever I wanted out of my life. I didn’t have to only be successful just once.

And so, I left you all, dearest students, and it was exciting, scary, and sad. On my way to a job interview at a nature center in the suburbs, I sobbed at a red light, imagining leaving you all.

In January of 2020, I started my new position as a Watershed Ambassador for an AmeriCorps program administered by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Against all my fears, I was successful again. I moved to New Jersey and rented a room on my own, taught students as young as seven, taught adults, made rain barrels, and waded through streams to collect scientific data. I started a second term in September and was preparing to do it all again.

However, in December of 2020, I hit another wall. I was miserable. I had to cancel meetings claiming I was sick when I was too depressed to convince myself to leave the house. I once again was trapped in a cycle of wondering whether I was doing enough, whether the work I was doing really mattered, feeling isolated and unsure. There were lots of reasons why that particular program was not a great fit for me, and I once again made the daunting decision to leave what I was doing and try something else. And once again, everyone was shocked because I had consistently been successful and confident enough that they never saw this coming. This time, however, I had no other job waiting in the wings for me to start afterwards.

I was unemployed for about a month, applying to Starbucks, Target, a local bakery. It was time to take a step back from relentlessly pursuing a prestigious career and instead simply work a job, figure things out, give myself time to just live for the sake of my own self, not for a grand purpose like teaching or saving the environment.

Now, I am a barista at a Starbucks. It is far from my most conventionally impressive career choice, and it is hardly where I ever expected to find myself. But I’m living a nice life. I work about thirty hours a week, doing straightforward work with mostly great people. I have plenty of time for walks around the city, sitting in parks staring at squirrels and birds, spending time with my girlfriend, learning to play cello, taking some biology classes at CCP, and pondering my future slowly, as I get to know myself.

For the first time, my career trajectory is not like the Delaware River I used to stare at from the subway platform, all-encompassing, swift, straight, and relentless in its route to its one goal, the bay and from there, the Atlantic. I am now more like the Penny Pot Stream where as a NJ Watershed Ambassador I once spent an idyllic afternoon catching bugs with a colleague to study for our program. I quietly meander through my little slice of forest, ready to twist and turn towards any of a number of possible goals and have no need to hurry to anything larger than what I already am. 

My final advice from all this, graduating class of 2021, is threefold, as all wise things are: One, your confidence does not have to be sincere to take you far. Two, life does not have to go as planned to be satisfying. And three, nothing needs to hold you back from pursuing your dreams, even your own past dreams.

As always, valete, discipulae.

P.S. I still have all the trinkets and notes any student ever gave me. I couldn’t fit them all in one picture, but I think this is all the stuff relevant to the ‘21 grads. Et Arby!