The Pleasure of Education and New Beginnings

In graduate school, I fell in love with the book Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks. My memory of what I specifically loved about that book has blurred over time, particularly as I read more and more of her work. But what remains is a sense of how challenging and how real the writing was—how inclusive of whole experiences and truths, comfortable and uncomfortable.

hooks doesn’t shy away from the pain or pleasure of education, indicating how learning and those we learn from can induce passion: Audre Lorde’s erotic, which is so hard to distinguish from the sexual because, as Lorde explains, we are taught to limit our sense of the erotic to the sexual or pornographic.

Accordingly, I think I can say that I have been romanced by some books, swept off my feet, falling for them. It’s funny thinking about this now, because for years I focused on the pain of education rather than the pleasure (even though there certainly was pleasure). I loved studying feminist theology but found that it made me “excruciatingly alive to the world,” in Gloria Anzaldua words. Falling in love can be like this too— agonizing while exciting. Painful as it opens you up, like Aslan cutting Eustace out of his dragon skin. BUT GOD/DESS—it is also enjoyable, passionate, and fun. Learning and teaching is fun; and I love having fun with my students. Even when the topics are hard and when the lessons hurt, it is the pleasure of relatedness to them, to text, to new understanding that facilitates the process. And without that pleasure, the work is unsustainable.

The year after my daughter was born was the most painful and difficult teaching year of my life. I was burning out and had lost connection with my students. What I realized after this year, returning to therapy, was that I lost them partially because I had lost myself. I was trying to be “a teacher,” or more accurately “a Professor,” rather than just teaching and exploring (aka researching). I got lost in standards and student learning outcomes, which eclipsed the texts, the understandings, and the exciting experiences and truths, I was hoping to share.

Slowly, I found myself again.

And I found new pleasure in new texts and making connections to these texts.

I just finished reading Project Hail Mary with my husband. I loved it and highly recommend it—the dialogue in the book has started to permeate my language with my partner (“question”).

We recently read the Aru Shah series with my daughter. The main character, Aru, discovers that she is in fact the reincarnation of Arjuna and must team up with other incarnations of her Pandava brothers to save the world and their own skins. This playful reimagining of Hindu characters and deities awakens my daughter’s curiosity, and my fuels my love for stories and sharing them.

And because sometimes an old text is new because you read it again, I re-listened to The Wheel of Time this year, all fourteen books; and I am still stunned by their beauty and magic.

I still love theory and feminist theology; and I will still teach them. But my new pleasures are also corresponding with new beginnings. I left my academic job after eleven years to finish my teaching credential and take a job at a high school this fall. I am returning to my first love in school: literature. I am bringing in my whole experience, comfortable and uncomfortable, as I start a new adventure. I will not say this move came without pain, as I again returned to questions of my identity. What did it mean to me to be a professor? To research? To teach? What does it mean to be a mom? A feminist? An agnostic scholar of religion? But I am also excited! Honoring my whole self, I am trying something new. And I think it will be a lot of fun.