Pax et Lux: What Calls You?

Why do I teach? Evading vocation and how it might find you anyway

Epidaurus, Greece. An ancient amphitheater and center for healing arts

This question is also ‘why do you do what you do?’

I am an educator. I teach, train, research at American University’s School of International Service, and fold that into the practice of international conflict resolution. But I used to hate school. I started preschool not speaking English. I remember miserable days of elementary school drudgery and a few mean-spirited teachers in the several primary schools I attended. As the perpetual new kid, it was trial by combat after school. Not that desperate to fit in, I took shelter in books and that one good friend who makes good trouble with me (and who is still my friend today).

During 6th grade, my English teacher, Mrs. Acierno, let a small group of us have an empty classroom so we could read and act out plays without supervision. We were giddy with new things: freedom, and creativity, and…camaraderie. We were role playing too. I was still basically a school hater, but this was now fun. And I learned something about both education and myself as a learner. (As you’ll see, these themes reemerge decades later.)

High school in contrast, was full of enlightening mentors. Beautiful people who shepherd the flock and care about much more than your classroom performance. At the height of my rebellion years, I came to love learning and had even begun to enjoy school—even though I was busy subverting the institution and breaking rules wherever possible. I don’t believe I was ever in a fight at either of my high schools. The gang wars were over by 1982, and an enormous library was on the top floor, with high windows, high bookshelves, and two sprightly librarians with too few bibliophiles among the student body. They purchased any Tolkien book I requested, but also hid a book I had used to make a little trouble for the principal: the Handbook of Students’ Rights.

I was late most days and signed my late slips with different mythical and historical figures, most of them rebels; Robin Hood and Zorro were regularly late to school but the security guard always took the slip and waved me in.

Could rebelliousness and hunger to learn ever work together? I preferred autonomous learning over structured environments, so in many ways, I still hated school or at least the idea of school, even though by senior year, it was an enjoyable part of my social existence. A little glimpse of my future was perhaps apparent in a little job I had giving talks on self-esteem at the elementary schools. Mr. Schifrin, my junior year American History teacher, would let me cut gym and have coffee with him in his office to discuss dictatorship and democracy. He also smoked a fragrant pipe in his office. When I hear the name ‘Pinochet’ even now, the coffee and pipe smoke aromas return. It didn’t hurt that I had a crush on the new girl from Poland who worked in his office.

University life offered new challenges; harder school work but also plenty of mentorship. It was a very rich time in my life in terms of developing a social conscience and a great desire to play a part in the big political themes of the mid- 1980s. I was given a professional aptitude test along the way. It turned out I was cut out to be a Teacher or Soldier. But what conventional military organization would put up with my insubordination and need for autonomy? At that time I was unaware that there’s a place for that in our military. And what school would want a teacher who didn’t particularly think rigidly structured class environments were worth a damn? I loved learning, but felt duty bound to hate school. I was not cognizant of any irony as I tutored extensively at college, and gave private guitar lessons to the neighborhood metal-heads where I lived.

Seven years after college, at my graduate school, The Fletcher School of Lies and Deception Law and Diplomacy I was by then on a mission to learn everything I could about international politics, war, peacemaking, diplomacy and statecraft. The conflicts in the Balkans, horn of Africa and Rwanda were just a sampling of the surge of civil wars plaguing the world at the time. I wanted to learn how to stop international aggression, and make conflict resolution more robust and muscular. I had barely any formal knowledge of these topics and every door to a career seemed shut. And yet, a path appeared as I walked.

At first I was true to my desire to avoid teaching. After being assured that academia would be forever off limits to me as I was practitioner, I landed a full-time university job. While academia is classrooms, exams and a rat race for research money, it is also an amazing space where the instructor’s job is help others develop their reason and develop themselves more fully as people ready to participate in the great drama of human existence. It is a profession where you don’t punch time cards or see much micromanagement. And if you love your subject, there’s a chance your learners will too. I was running toward teaching all my life and just didn’t know it.

Universities are also communities filled with both pettiness and rivalry as well as…autonomy and camaraderie. You are paid to use your brain and your heart. In Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he reflected on his own journey in academia and how the “University” is not actually tethered to any bureaucracy. In the same way a church edifice is not itself the religion, Pirsig wrote “the real University…has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. The real University is a state of mind… The real University is nothing less than the continuing body of reason itself.” It is the journey of learning that very few can pursue, and it takes place everywhere people are trying to create knowledge, share that knowledge and enrich their minds and lives with it.

In over twenty five years of teaching I have encountered a few Jedi learners who were motivated by a hunger to develop themselves and to go do battle with whatever they wanted to challenge; injustice, war, poverty, domination, exploitation. The best ones also looked inward and worked on themselves along the way.

That college aptitude test was astoundingly predictive. I was reminded today by my colleague Pamela Aall that I played a supporting role when she was standing up the Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding at the United States Institute of Peace, which Congress created to be the American people’s means to achieve the “resolution of conflicts among nations without the use of violence”. I also do an annual lecture at Marine Corps University’s Command and Staff College and have spent well over a decade preparing Department of Defense advisors for deployments to partner countries.

And our 6th grade role playing…maybe it had something to do with the way I teach negotiation today: by coaching people into roles and helping them find their voice. Some of my stars are themselves teaching alongside their exemplary careers as soldiers and diplomats.

My journey from school hater to a faculty at the invisible University of the mind seems linear now. No matter how fast I ran away from my vocation I was running headlong into it. I could not have chosen better. Perhaps I could not have chosen. I was called rather, and ultimately, I answered.

Why do you do what you do?

I want to hear from you.