Can I tell you something?
I'm not going to be a physics teacher.
There. I said it. It's out. I thought about giving up lying for Lent and then realized that I'd have to drop this teaching physics class that I'm in and figure out some other way to fill up the last of my physics electives and that would just be a pain. In addition to the other things that I'd have to tell the truth about all the time. Shudder.
I mean, I'm not closing the door on this option. By the time I'll graduate, I'll have a teaching license to spiffy up my pathetic physics BA with possible religion minor. I'm an honors program dropout (and happy about it, too- they didn't give me my Shakespeare this year and they don't offer classes I can feasibly take any more and you need a 3.5 [Oh. My. Lanta.] to write a thesis in physics anyway- 3.5 Math and Physics GPA), I'm a BS dropout (delighted about that one, tell me you), I've done anything but excel academically. I'm John Lennon after the Beatles broke up- I'm depending on my laurels and occasionally using this gift I've been given. My point is, I have a depressing (to me) collegiate record, the kind that needs dressing up in anyway possible if I'm going to (gasp!) apply to grad schools next year.
And I've got extracurriculars, like band and band and band and band. And SAI (one of these days I will write an epic post about the wonderfulness that is the sisterhood of Sigma Alpha Iota at the Iota Tau Chapter at UNC and you, my friends, will be jealous). And I work at the planetarium (and I've done some training on the new digital system- get excited, it's going to be legendary). And I participate in various religious organizations as much as time allows- University United Methodist's college Sunday School, small group (Caribou, Friday mornings, 10 o'clock, be there or be square) and bell choir, the Wesley foundation (as soon as band quits) and CCF (Campus Christian fellowship, though they meet when bells rehearses and the bible study got moved to Tuesdays). But it's not high school, when I was convinced that I had every application in the bag (though, in retrospect, Princeton was really just an opportunity for embarrassment). I don't have letters of recommendation lined up and my GPA only reflects the fact that I'm a science BA- I've taken enough science and math classes to substantially lower it and enough humanities (I'm not judging, I'm just saying) to keep it afloat.
So I stepped into this teaching physics world with the idea that being in front of a classroom would be a good thing, that maybe I could be out in the 'real world' for a little while before going on to... whatever it was that I thought I was going on to and that this was going to provide me with a solid backup plan because, as I still maintain, being ordained is a big thing to be wrong about. And, of course, it would make my BA look better. In general, all pluses.
So I went to observe a physics class on Tuesday and had that sinking realization that I could not do this. No, not that I couldn't do that, because I could teach physics, and I'm learning a lot now about good ways to help students really get the concepts and ways of making it less scary (because it isn't scary at the levels most of you live on... though sometimes I want to go hide my head under my pillows- let's be honest, my mattress- because of my homework) and I could stand up in front of a class, 8-3 Monday-Friday and I could grade papers and I could help students and I could do all of this, but I shouldn't do that. Along with the fact that I will attempt at all costs to dissuade you from a physics major (unless you're good at it or you have some odd admiration for the topic and are willing to devote hours, nay, days to the end of understanding its possessive and elusive nature) and so, by such reckonings, should not be a high school physics teacher and dissuade potential future physicists, I sat in the back of that classroom and realized that it was not the place for me. I know this whole picking what you want to do with your life is new (especially for those of us without male reproductive organs) because for the most part of history you just did what your dad did or you got sold off as an apprentice or something like that, but I'm glad I have the chance to look around and see where my talents are best used in the world. And that place is not necessarily a physics classroom.
I used to think that when people talked about things being wrong in life, they were just joking. I honestly thought that there really wasn't a place that someone wouldn't be perfectly happy being if they put their minds to it. Misery, drama, stuff like that was clearly reserved for the fictional world of sitcoms and books. You can't end up in a job you wouldn't like, that just didn't happen. I'm not entirely sure why I thought that, but I did. But I've realized that the idea that your heart can be somewhere else entirely doesn't have to apply to that time when your romantic love is far from your sight. My heart is not in teaching physics. My heart (gasp! again!) is not even in astronomy, though that comes closer to the mark. Two dollars if you guess where I'm headed.
Listen, it doesn't make me any better than anyone else if I'm headed for a lifetime of Sunday mornings. I've talked with a couple of friends about why we'd pick ordination instead of the billions of other professions available, all of which can be glorifying to God if the person is willing to live for Him. And we've come up with things like, "I'm too pissed off to leave the church now" or "This way, I'm saying to everyone that I'm God's" or "This is the right way for me to care for people." But what I want to submit to you, my friends, is not some fancy or even plain yet heartfelt reason why I want to set my life aside for the Church but two anecdotes, if you will, two stories.
It's Tuesday. I'm sitting in my Modern Islamic Civilizations class, which I'm quickly falling in love with, despite massive amounts of reading and a real witchb of a TA, and my professor is talking about Muhammad. It's near the beginning of the semester, so he's allowed to use all his stored phrases and prepared speeches because we won't have heard them already. He's talking about Muhammad and the Qur'an and how there's nothing new in the Qur'an. A prophet is always called to speak to his people a message of remembrance, of bringing back to their minds the things God has already told them but that they forgot- care for those in need, fight injustice, love one another. He's talking about this and about prophets and prophetic figures and my heart is burning. "Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?" (Luke 24:32)
It's Tuesday again. I'm sitting in the back of a physics classroom at East Chapel Hill High and I'm amazed at how this guy knows his stuff. He's eyeballing equations and calling out numbers without a calculator, picking out students which he knows will either give out the answer or bring up a problem that will benefit the entire class, making jokes, helping them focus, teaching, leading the class. They're learning circuits and Kirchhoff's laws, stuff I've gotten down pat at this point in my mind, and they've got it covered. The class is going well, the teacher's got this well in hand and I'm sitting back there thinking, I can't do this. There's this dead weight in my chest. What am I thinking? What could ever have possessed me to say that this is what I would do with my life? The teacher's helping them understand something, preparing kids for being things like doctors (they all have to pass a college physics class), engineers, chemists, biologists, physicists, really annoyingly scientifically literate writers, or whatever else they want to be in life, because they're thinking, they're working through something, they're learning. The kids clearly respect him. I'm sure that he's been there for many a student with a problem. He's positively impacting his world. But I couldn't be him.
But to each one of us grace has been given as Christ apportioned it. (Ephesians 4:7)
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