Today was the last day of my two year stint as a teacher, and the question I was most urgently trying to answer throught the various leave takings, gift givings, tidying ups was (and is) "did I make a difference?" In other words I was trying to assuage / silence / distance the belief that I must have had running for millenia: "I'm completely irrelevant, at best slightly annoying, at worst excess baggage."
So I eagerly looked for thank you cards, gifts from students etc. any evidence which would indicate I was anything other than a completely forgettable impersonator, a hollow man (and even the man epithet may be too substantial), a boring nonenity who had passed his sell by date and to whom the kids were mildly indifferent as long as I did not bother them. Such evidence was - of course? - sparse...I won't publicly humiliate myself by reducing it to numbers, but lets say that from students these internal court exhibits for the defence did not exceed the digits on a lemur's fore -paw. And there we must let the matter rest, with a sigh of pseudo resignation and a certain heavyness but also with a wonderful sense of liberation: perhaps other contexts will play to my strengths more, although at age 45 I have not yet found out what those contexts might be.
On the other hand there is ample evidence that I did make some kind of impact on a few students and a few staff members ( that word, gotta be careful with it...) And what does it mean in my inner language to make an impact? Translated it means there were moments of authenticity, moments where "they" (the bestowers of relevance/irrelevance, as I have set it up) got to see that I too can flow, or be a conduit to the flow, that I too burn with an energy and passion here and there, and a certainty and a purpose and a freedom....
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