9 to 5 -- well, actually, 8:15 to 12:25

I've been torn between wanting to write all about my job, and worrying that a past, current, or future employer--or worse, a parent--will somehow read it and end up hating, firing, or suing me, respectively. I would never share personal information about a student. It's mostly the blatant admissions of moral and professional turpitude that I'm afraid of exposing.

But that's what makes this new job something worth writing about: the surprising lack of turpitude it inspires. For example, just now, when I decided to use the word "turpitude," I actually looked it up in the dictionary to make sure it was appropriate. It wasn't quite the word I was looking for; I thought it meant "laziness." I'll leave it in in case you didn't know that.

Anyway, when preparing lessons for the classes I'm teaching, I find myself able, and even inspired, to keep working until the job is done. I am committed to making sure we cover all of the course objectives, and to making sure that every student is meeting them as we go along. No more putting off grading for weeks on end until papers are so piled up that I decide not to count the assignments. I've actually started grading papers the day they're turned in and returning them promptly the next day. Amazingly, the students read my comments and ask how they can get better grades! No more throwing in a lesson that has nothing to do with the previous topic of study because I'm too tired to write a new one or want to watch Lost. Maybe this will all change in January (when Lost is back on), but for now, I haven't been watching TV at all except for the debates.

Part of this may be pure fear: if I lose this job, our only hope will be getting picked up by a political campaign as a sob story illustrating the failure of the American economic system to reward higher education. (Don't you get something for appearing in campaign commercials, like maybe no-questions-asked food stamps?) Also, our program is the only accredited degree in the country for this population, and accreditation depends on meeting objectives, maintaining college standards, and the like. To be the one who brings down a desperately needed flagship educational program would be a career lowlight, for sure.

But it's mostly due to an amazing fact--amazing because it is so obvious, yet so ignored by the practitioners and administrators of public education. I care because my students care. In teaching, you hear a lot about the reverse of that maxim: Students only care when we care. (And showing Stand and Deliver will make them care, ese.)The assumption is always that if only a teacher cares enough, he or she can make the students buy in...and topple institutionalized racism through calculus.

But so much depends on the students. I will never be as charismatically inspirational as Edward James Olmos, or Meryl Streep, or Michelle Pfeiffer, or even the crackhead played by Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson. (Though Ryan Gosling sure inspires me, if you know what I'm sayin. Heh, heh.) Heck, the best I can hope for is the bumbling Steve Coogan in the brilliant Hamlet 2, and even that's a stretch. Probably 5 percent of all teachers have that innate gift of inspiring with their personalities, rather than with fleeting coolness, fear, intimidation (by discipline or grading on a curve), bribery, or painstaking, exhaustive preparation. And when your classes gleefully trounce your preparedness day in and day out, with their drunkenness or their smirks or their attempts to start fistfights or fires in your classroom, it's easy to decide not to prepare anything at all.

But when your students appear to be listening to every word you say, make eye contact, ask for help, email you when they miss class to ask for the homework, and seem so earnestly committed to overcoming their limitations, it's pretty hard to spend four hours watching Sarah Palin-mocking videos instead of modifying tests, writing those Jeopardy questions that all students seem to love, emailing extra instructions to a kid who didn't get it, or memorizing notes for tomorrow.

No, any more than 2 hours of Palin videos would be turpitudinous.