The Dry Salvages

Except for a few precious hours on Friday nights, I had little of what is generally called a life. My wife and I seldom went out. My normally robust correspondence dwindled to nothing. I was unable to file our income taxes until July. Though I took pains not to appear so to my students, I was often despondent. One morning, when my wife remonstrated with me for picking up a drunk hitchhiker by myself on a lonely road late the night before - ‘What if he had pulled a gun?’ - I responded, half joking, that if I could just get myself shot I might not have to correct any more papers.

My point here is that even under ideal circumstances, public-school teaching is one of the hardest jobs a person can do. Most sensible people know that. Anyone who claims not to know that is either a scoundrel or a nincompoop; or, to put it another way, a typical expert on everything that’s wrong with American public education and the often damaged children it serves.