The payoff

"I think her students are lucky to have her."

The compliment is deliberate, and public, and probably unnoticed by anyone but me, its object. I'm curious why she--my mother--has said so during this obligatory Sunday lunch, but she doesn't elaborate, and I don't ask. That's how it goes in my family. We say, "I love you," with twenty dollar bills and drop meaningful phrases into random conversations instead of ever speaking directly. But something's going on with my job and me. Who knows: maybe she can tell.

Maybe it has something to do with this semester not being last semester, when I had no choice but to use up all those sick days and my students' most common question was, "Are you going to be gone again?"

Maybe it has something to do with finally hitting tenure, six years into my current position. It was never a question of job security; my qualifications are rare enough, and I'm good enough at what I do. But maybe the fact that the folders full of school stuff on my home computer are still labeled with the name of the school district, as if I were on my way to some other, greener educational pasture at any time, reveals something about the attitude with which I signed that original contract. After all, it's so far from home.

Which of course, it still is, but that is neither here nor there--it's all the miles in between. But, besides being another post, it's an expensive inconvenience that I'll be overlooking for the duration. Somehow, I seem to have arrived at someplace new without changing my route or my employer.

My predecessor always seemed to relish her imagined helplessness, and I suppose it does make for an easy job. "Ohhh, you can't do that," she told me time after time. And, every time, I stumped her simply by asking why not. I am no firebrand, but I have made things happen--good things--that were never before attempted. It's easy enough to be a force for change when one is willing to haul all the necessary crap over the bar alone; it's not as if that barrier weren't set awfully low.

My students now have classes in which they can learn something more than how to sink or swim and get graduation credit to boot; I now have a job that I want. Oh, it's still impossible, maybe more impossible that it ever was, now that I've tried to make it what it should have been all along, but I love trying, and everyone knows it, and what more can one person do?

Well, sometimes, one person can pull out a magic wand, or appear to, in the eyes of a 17-year old who has done everything she thought she was supposed to do and has yet been failed by the system that does not get it, because systems never do. And if you are the person who has finally stayed in a job long enough to know where the strings are and how to pull them, who has banked enough personal credibility that, "Oh sure, for you," is the automatic answer, and for whom a literal happy dance in the middle of the cafeteria is clearly just the thing to do and nothing to be sheepish about, well, then you might almost be looking forward to going to work on Monday, too.