Why I Am Certainly Coming Back

I was just trolling the comments over at TMAO’s own resignation saga and discovered that apparently this whole “I’m-taking-a-break-but-coming-back” line is already a cliché. (I guess he is not planning to return to the kids? I don’t believe it.)

Let me tell you why I am unquestionably coming back.

Four years ago, one of the three good teachers I encountered in my credential program framed TFA perfectly. Talking to a group of corps members who were attending her office hours, she said, “Ask yourself: is your teaching service or philanthropy?”

Two years, or four years even, given to the needy masses as a present from the rich and mighty, for the quiet quid pro quo of networking and resume building, is as much philanthropy as a $10,000 check to an art museum. Don’t get me wrong: Philanthropy is a good thing and we need plenty of it, but it is a gift, nothing more. Philanthropy can be an investment in the community, but also the assuaging of guilt, the buying of indulgences, or a public relations campaign. Literally, it implies an affection for people, no deeper values or ensuing commitments.

Service is work. It is a labor wrought for the benefit of others. It implies that the power is in the hands of the one being served, connoting a sense of humility and selflessness in the very act. Serving must be modified into “self-serving” to suggest a personal benefit. When you serve your community or your country, you validate its needs and subsume your own. Service demands an egalitarian value, a belief that the people being served are worthy of the work.

Think about it in fire and brimstone terms: A life spent accruing wealth and then divvying it up in philanthropy must still be reconciled at some great accounting in the sky, where pecuniary profits derived from the sins of commerce might be balanced by the most immense and effective charity. A life spent in service is pure profit of the soul.

I don't want to be a philanthropist. I believe that my work is, and must be, service. I know I am coming back to The Trenches because I have closely held its satisfaction and I cannot imagine giving it up. I am not rich, but I have enough money to taste the shallow sustenance offered by some of the more exquisite fruits of the material world. There is nothing I can buy that will outlast its own memory. There is nothing I can buy that will return the investment made in me by my family and community. There is nothing I can buy that can create more justice or less suffering. There is nothing I can buy that will make me a wiser, better person. So if these are what I want, there is nothing I can do but serve.

Some days, as I drive home in anger and agony, I repeat to myself, “Service is joy.” It comes from a well-known piece in a book of prayer read at my dinner table growing up, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy./I awoke and saw that life was service./I acted and behold! Service was joy.” Service is joy not because it is easy nor fun but because it is deeply liberating. It is joyful outside of the daily and weekly stress, joyful in the passing seasons and years. Service is the emancipation from self-doubt, it is the freedom from life-angst, it is the escape from the agonizing puzzlement of “Who am I?” and “What am I supposed to do?”

I know that I am a servant and I am here to serve.

We need people to serve in all the myriad ways people are talented, from fire-fighters to florists. I choose to serve in education and at an actual school. I choose education because I love learning and it calls to me as fire-fighting and floristry do not. I also know that there is a purity of service in people-work that is difficult to find in commerce and industry. I feel drawn to be a writer, for instance, but I suspect I would find myself compromising my service for the sake of my art or my wallet. Whether in finding any true vocation, one finds a way to pure service, is a whole other question. I know education works for me.

I choose to serve in the classroom because I feel that, so long as I can, I must. The farther you go from washing the feet of the people you serve, the closer you get to philanthropy and its inherent disrespect. When you can no longer name the names of the people whose lives you effect, you drift ever closer to seeing them as simply another form of the bottom line. Are improving proficiency rates and improving profit margins that different, if all you see are the numbers? Humility and egalitarianism are certainly not evinced by the vast majority of the policies and "resources" dropped down on us from the district office and every level above. Those were once people of service. How can I trust myself to be that much different?

My life in China, my work helping really rich kids do amazing things with technology, will be fun and fantastic, but as I can never see it as service, it cannot be as satisfying and it cannot be as joyful as my life here. That is why I will return to The Trenches. This work is my service. Service is my joy.