not being a teacher

I decided to become a nurse rather than a teacher for a few reasons: I want a schedule where I can be with my kids more; I want to make enough money to have more kids; at some point, I realized that I felt a stab of envy every time I set foot in a hospital. I wanted to be part of meeting people's needs in a very basic way. 

Those are the practical reasons, the ones I can talk about without being kind of embarrassed, feeling like I'm being sanctimonious.The other reason is this: I don't think ambition is healthy. Not for me, anyway. For me, it's like a cancer, turning the things I love into sources of anxiety and meanness.

I don't want that for myself, and I feel like that's what our education system has become about, and maybe that's necessary. Maybe you do need to be coaching students in how to get ahead in our economic system rather than holding up the curtain so they can see past it, rather than reminding them, every day, that they have inherent worth right now – that they won't suddenly attain that worth when they pass the Regents. And, to be fair, it's easy for me to have romantic fantasies about the “real value” of education, about what it should really be: I have always had enough to eat. I got into college and had the skills to get through it.

Yes, kids who can read and write and do math will more than likely have better lives than kids who can't. But a vision that can only imagine that, that imagines that as the social justice issue of this century, as the kids say, seems anemic to me. And I feel like education, and especially education reform, has become a pet project of well-off young adults who teach for two years and then can't wait to Make Change, whereas I believe very strongly that change often is made by talking less and acting more.

I have to remind myself, or be reminded, that I believe that, and that's why I want to be a nurse. I am a person who is perilously close to shooting my mouth off all the time, and as many As as I get for my scathing critical theory papers, as formidable as I come across over brunch if someone brings up Bloomberg, I'd trade a hundred opinions and episodes of PC agitas for a clean bedpan, a shot of morphine when I need it, someone to get the doctor when my blood pressure starts tap dancing or my epidural falls out.

I think change is made less in endless rounds of conference calls and rallies and more in those moments when small, good things are done. Basically, I think a lot of people believe they are above changing adult diapers; I'm equally vulnerable to that particular bit of smallness. But in my best moments, I believe that no one is above anything that another human being needs to have done, that being respected and cared for when you are sick as though you mattered is critically important. And I believe I can do that.