The Good Life

I returned to the fold this weekend by spending Saturday afternoon at Teach For America's "What's Next?" workshop. There, I met with Corps Members considering careers in medicine who wanted to know more about my decision to change careers and the process of applying to medical school. This, of course, was not my idea. The fiancee volunteered herself and "inadvertently" told a TFA New York administrator that her betrothed was ALSO an alum of the program. Apparently TFA had nobody else who was in a position to speak about medicine, because they overlooked the giant red flag waving menacingly atop my record and welcomed me with open arms.

The event was being held at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (subtext: BE A LAWYER!), and began with a panel discussion by TFA alums with careers in various fields. The room where the panel discussion was held is enormous, with - I don't know - 100 ft high ceilings, and portraits of fancy lawyers in pretty suits covering the walls (subtext: BE A LAWYER!). The panel included a school administrator, a teacher, a TFA program director, an investment banker (or some such business-type guy), a lawyer, and a city planner. Guess which of these folks was the best dressed, most articulate, and most charismatic? Well, it was the banker, but the lawyer came in a close second (subtext: well, ok, be an I-banker, OR A LAWYER, just make some MONEY).

As a side note, I don't have any problem at all with the unspoken prong of TFA's mission. In a very real way, the schools and the districts in which we work don't have the infrastructure to support meaningful change. So while one prong of the mission is to supply failing schools with dedicated, smart, grossly underqualified teachers (who, I believe, do a fair amount of good in their own right), the second prong invites alums to try to rise to positions of power, from which they might be able to impact policy. The truth is that policy makers, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, seem not to listen to teachers. But they'll listen to a guy with a nice suit and an MBA from Columbia.

So I'm watching this panel discussion, and a girl asks a questions that sounds more or less like the following: "I've worked a couple of office jobs in the past, and I always found those offices reasonably quiet and comfortable. When I started teaching, I couldn't believe how hectic everything was. But eventually, I got used to my classroom always moving, and full of noises, and students stopping me just to hug me. Now I'm worried that I won't be able to go back to an office. So I guess my question is, how do you get used to the boredom of being back behind a desk?"

This was not a concern that I held as a teacher. I remember one day, during my second year of teaching, a friend and former teacher came to visit the school after spending a few months working as a paralegal (...CLOSER). Remember when you were a kid, and one of your buddies found out that his dad subscribed to a special channel, like channel 97 or 99, with naked ladies on it? And that kid was saddled with the momentous task of trying to describe this wildly wonderful and totally inexplicable thing to you and all your friends? Well, this was what it was like to hear Ms. G reporting on her new office job. She tried her best though, as a small group of us gathered around her in the halls after school let out. "I just... I mean. When I need to go to the bathroom, I can just, you know, leave my desk. And go to the bathroom. Literally, whenever I want. Except maybe when I'm taking an important phone call." Our eyes widened as we glanced back and forth at one another. "But that's not even... I mean... I sometimes leave my desk even if I don't have to go to the bathroom at all. We have a water cooler, with cups next to it, and sometimes I go there to get a cup of water. Sometimes I'll stop by a friends desk on the way back to my desk. And we'll chat. And when I get back to my desk, it hasn't destroyed itself while I wasn't watching."

But I didn't even need the luxury of all you can drink water and unrestricted trips to the john. During my second year, I was summoned to jury duty. For the week before my day at the courthouse, I was on cloud nine. I couldn't believe my good fortune, and neither could my friends. I was in court for a single day. I sat for some 6-8 hours on a miserably hard wooden bench, but I might as well have been on a beach in Acapulco. For those 6-8 hours, I quietly read a novel, and was only occasionally interrupted by some guy reading off a list of names that weren't mine. Simply glorious.

Anyway, the boredom of an office job was never something that concerned me. And from the looks in the eyes of the teachers gathered around my round table discussion about careers in medicine, it wasn't a concern that many of these TFAers shared. "In medical school," I said, and paused dramatically, "you're asked to sit quietly while scientists talk to you about science." The giddiness rolled in waves through the crowd. "And then, when they're done talking, you go home and read books about what they were talking about. Sometimes you highlight words in those books." A few gasp audibly as they imagine such a peaceful day. A few teachers raise their hands to venture questions:

"These scientists, do they swear at you when you ask them questions?"
"Almost never."

Gasp!

"Tell me, do these scientists pee on your floor?"
"I've never seen anyone in my medical school, either teacher or student, pee on anything that wasn't meant to be peed on."

Surely he must be kidding!

"Do these scientists become enraged when other scientists touch their pencils or look at them from across the room?"
"Almost certainly. But they bury their fury as bitter pellets of hatred beneath oversized lab coats."

How wonderful!

It was a nice way to spend my Saturday. And I got a free lunch out of it. Then I walked across the island and caught a train back to the medical library, where I unfurled my supermap of metabolic pathways and began reading and rereading about various metabolic pathways to prepare for what's become our weekly Monday exams. I probably should have been a lawyer.