A Calling

by Dennis Green

In our completely dysfunctional, materialistic society, you don’t hear that quaint expression much anymore. A calling is a passionate desire to do something, to follow the call of your spirit. It used to apply to the ministry, and perhaps still does. It also was once applied to teaching, but no more.

Those who are great at teaching feel it as a calling. They love the students, love being in the classroom, love seeing those eager young faces light up as an idea, or a process, or even a rule of grammar gets through to them and they can say, “Ah-HA!” If you love teaching, you will have that experience almost every day that you teach. And there are no excuses!

“Difficult circumstances,” students who are from poor families, who are learning English, who never saw an alarm clock before, never had to exercise the kind of self-discipline it takes to do your homework, study or compose a report all night long, prepare for a tough exam..? Good teachers will get past all that.

I’ve known all sorts of people who have felt an irrestible calling in their lives. Nurses, doctors, artists, writers, scientists, a rodeo cowboy, a Hell’s Angel, an architect, even a lawyer or two. Two ministers, a cabbie, one cop, a mechanic, a man who owned a bookstore, and lots and lots of teachers.

For myself, I taught college-level English, Composition and Advertising classes over the course of 14 years. At UC Santa Barbara, under Affirmative Action, I had kids in my classes with all those cited disadvantages, and yet I taught them, and they learned, and some of them excelled. I even had students who were part of the Lompoc Prison “Prisoner-Release Program,” including one who wrote a story about “shanking” a fellow inmate. I had to fail him.

“But Mr. Green!” he complained. “I came to all your classes!”

“Yes, Rodney, but you didn’t do all the work. You handed in only four of the ten assignments.” Get it? Got it? Good!

At Hayward State, teaching Advertising, I faced a similarly diverse student body — many kids from affluent middle-class homes, many from backgrounds of poverty, many the first in their families to go to college at all. Classes of 40-50 students, and I resolved that by breaking them down into “agencies” of five students each.

In the 90-minute classes, I would lecture for half an hour, conduct a lively discussion for twenty minutes, and then have them meet in their smaller groups and solve some dilemma I posed for the final forty minutes. “Pick a product or service, then design a campaign around it, and for your final exam, give the class the presentation you would give the client. Make it good.”

Then I would make the rounds, sit in with each group for a few minutes, and get a sense of which students weren’t getting it and were falling behind. Those students got special one-on-one tutorials during my office hours, until they caught up.

I had my Hayward students enthralled only two evenings a week, so I can imagine having them, in high school, say, for five days straight. I would love it! And while I was making only $700/month at Hayward, I never in all my years taught for the money. Many years at UCSB, I barely knew what I was making, and often teaching full-time, three sections of 30 students each, earning $800/month.

If it’s truly a calling, it’s not about the money. In fact, paying lower salaries tends to filter out the greedy, but not those who feel the calling. A passion for teaching beats a passion for bucks any day. “Why teach if you can make more money going into high tech, or nursing, or finance?” one pal asked me recently. Indeed, that’s just the point. Because you must.

©2010 Dennis Green