Two Roads Diverged

I don't teach freshmen anymore (thanks be to God), but I did my first year teaching high school. The spring semester started with a poetry unit and the linchpin of the unit was Robert Frost's famous "The Road Not Taken." We began the semester with the poem and the student's memorized it over the course of a month or so. Boy, do we ever mess up that poem.

I am posting below something I wrote for my students that semester. I am posting it now because I am reconsidering what I wrote. Not, it should be noted, that we royally screw up the interpretation of this poem. By golly, we sure do. But, the moral choice that is presented is, I think, slightly different than the conclusion I reached at the end of this. I will follow up in another post with what I am thinking these days.

Lessons in Paying Attention to Titles: Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”

I do not remember everything that hung on the walls of my junior high classrooms, but there is one poster in the sentimental sloganeering covering the walls like vomit that does remain in my memory vault: my sixth grade English teacher had a poster of a verdant forest with a narrow path that split into two directions. At the bottom right-hand corner of the poster was the final words of Robert Frost’s classically misunderstood poem, “The Road Not Taken”: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/ I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference” (18-20). We might have talked about the poem; in fact, I am sure we did, but mostly I remember my eyes meandering away from whatever the text at hand was to ponder that picture and the wisdom of its final lines. It was, after all, a paean to the American dream: the rugged individual carving out his solitary path and becoming an iconoclast; the non-conformist; the, well, poet, I guess.

Imagine my surprise, then, reading this poem again as an adult and discovering that this sentimental notion of standing out from the crowd and making your way is not at all the message actually being conveyed in the poem. In fact, the actual message of the poem seems to be that life forces us to make decisions that we would rather not make; we therefore spend our time rationalizing what is essentially an irrational decision and then pick a path arbitrarily and hope it works out in the end. Generations of readers who have seen in this poem an affirmation of do-it-yourselfiveness seem to be ignoring something it always bears keeping in mind about a poem: its title. Frost, after all, did not call the poem “The Road Less Traveled” but “The Road Not Taken.”

The poem is an extended metaphor comparing life decisions to a split path in a “yellow wood” (1). Immediately we see that the tone is not one of triumph but resignation: the speaker is “sorry” (2) that he cannot take both paths, and though he strains down one path “[t]o where it ben[ds] in the undergrowth” (5) he is unable to clearly comprehend which path is better. Indeed, the other path is “just as fair” (6) and though he is tempted to create a fiction that it is worn less he eventually concedes that “the passing there/ Had worn them really about the same” (9-10). In other words, of the two paths neither is more clearly worn than the other, neither is more aesthetically pleasing, and neither offers a better path. The decision becomes one less of cold calculation or moral bravery than simply a coin flip. The speaker’s choice of the second path had nothing to do with rational decision-making processes, but pure randomness.

As the poem moves into its third stanza regret is mingled in with the randomness. For a fleeting moment the speaker sounds hopeful that he might “[keep] the first for another day” (13) and presumably return to this moment of decision. However, this hope is quickly replaced with the assurance that in life “way leads on to way” and it is impossible to return to the original moment of decision. Paths open upon other paths and the speaker will find himself at another split in the road before too long of an interval.      

Which brings us to the fourth stanza and the ending lines that stared down at generations of Mrs. Timmerman's students. The stanza begins and ends with lines of ambiguity as the speaker imagines narrating this event in the future. The stanza begins, “I shall be telling this with a sigh” (16). In many ways your interpretation of this poem hinges on how you read the single word “sigh.” Is this a sigh of regret? A sigh of relief? A sigh, perhaps, of pleasure? The text is unclear. The second ambiguity, and the one that ends the poem is the final line: “And that has made all the difference” (20). The ambiguity here, of course, is how to read the single word “difference.” I know from experience at various restaurants that the adjective "different"--as in, this tastes different--can be used both positively and negatively. How, then, do we decide?

I believe that the three lines between these two bookends can shed some light on this question. The speaker is imagining himself telling the story of this decision with the ambiguous sigh “[s]omewhere ages and ages hence” (17). The distinction is subtle, but it is clear that his telling of the story diverges from the actual experience of the story. When he imagines himself telling the story, he will create the self-serving fiction that he took the “road less traveled by” (19), but we know from the rest of the poem that there are absolutely no grounds for making this claim. Each road is equal. In a moment of stunning honesty and humanity, we see how the speaker will want to remember this moment: in the best possible light. But therein lies the rub: we do not know how the other road would have turned out; we can never know. It is this that haunts so much of human experience: the question of what could have been.

This question is the issue of the poem. We want to make our own choices; we want to believe that life is somehow rational and the less traveled path will work in our favor. But we cannot know. We can only pick a path and hope. To some this might be depressing, but for me this is liberating. Pick a path and go with it. It will not be the only time you come to such a crossroad. When you get to another one, pick again. This poem encourages me to get over my arrogance that says I can figure this out on my own and make my own go of things. As a wise man once said, “In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps” (Proverbs 16:9).

Happy choosing, friends.

Milton as Human Being

In ramping up my reading on Milton in preparation for teaching Paradise Lost starting this week, I have finally begun reading Dennis Danielson's Milton's Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy. This title and author kept cropping up several years back when I was writing my thesis on Milton but it never seemed entirely germane to the topics about which I was writing. And, as Robert Frost famously says, "way leads onto way" and here I am six years later finally picking it up.

I couldn't be more pleased thus far. I have long intuited that creative works have more theodical value than theological or philosophical tracts. Theodicy is basically a way of giving justice to God. Theos of course refers to God. Dike is the Greek goddess who personified justice. So, a theodicy is a work that attempts to justify God, what we more commonly today call apologetics.

Milton's entire project in Paradise Lost is theodical. The poem presents his attempt to "justify the ways of God to men." Since my first reading of the poem, I have felt that Milton did a far better job through the story-form and within the conventions of epic poetry of completing this justification project than any works of apologetics with which I concerned myself in my post-adolescent can-this-all-be-true seeking stage.

But before I get into any of that, I wanted to pause over a passage in the introductory chapter, "The Contexts of Milton's Theodicy," where Danielson argues for something very near and dear to my reading of Milton: the fact that, insane intelligence and 400 year gap aside, Milton is a human being. I'll quote Danielson at length here:

Now the fairly naive recognition that Milton was a person like you or me actually encourages an intellectual-historical model less naive than one often encounters in studies of Milton. For ourselves, I believe, we generally posit unity of mind and creative personality; and we should therefore be wary of radically distinguishing Milton the poet from Milton the thinker. . . We would also surely deny that a recognition of the sources and parallels of our own thought and expression somehow explained it all away, and we must likewise avoid thinking that, once we have presented analogues or demonstrated influences of Milton's thought, we have "said it all." 

Danielson here lucidly describes a problem I had while working on my thesis: so many of the Milton critics I read seemed more concerned with elucidating his influencers as a means to explain him away than they did with appreciating his work. Further, they denied so many other factors that determine the intellectual and spiritual life of a human being--which Danielson helpfully reminds us Milton was--that exist beyond the books we read. He continues: 

While admitting that we ourselves are influenced, moreover, do we not also recognize that our conceptual and pistic landscape is like a patchwork stitched together from various scraps of conversation, reading, experience, and disposition, the dye from each scrap bleeding into the one adjacent to it in the quilt, so that the hue of the each is subtly altered by virtue of its now integrated relation to the whole? [If we accept this picture as true for ourselves] it might curb the academic urge to treat written texts (especially written texts available to us) as if they were the only sorts of things by which Milton could have been influenced. 

Danielson goes on to conclude that while texts may be all we have now to go by, an awareness of the "nontextual background" will both make us more humble and sophisticated as readers of Milton.

I can't tell you how much I resonate with this. Danielson isn't nullifying historically-justified speculative work, studies of influences and forebears, or dismissing historical criticism more broadly. Indeed, his whole project as he readily admits is a historical, theological, and literary view of Paradise Lost. What he is saying is that humans are vastly more complex than some literary critics would have us believe. Have I been shaped by the books I read? Undoubtedly. But I have also been shaped, and this perhaps moreso, by the conversations I have had about those books with other people. If someone were to write an intellectual history of my life (and, dear God, I can't imagine being that poor sucker), they could go by the books on my shelves and the ways I have marked them up, but there is simply no way to be privy to the conversations, to the thinking I do while running, driving, or taking a shower. 

I love the metaphor Danielson uses of our lives as a quilt, where the dye from each square bleeds into the next. We are not intellectual beings or spiritual beings or rational beings or emotional beings or instinctual beings but intellectual-spiritual-rational-emotional-instinctual beings. We cannot pull apart these threads without unraveling that whole quilt. It is good to be reminded of this, if not merely out of charity, in the way we read and approach others.

Why I Read Books, Reason 25,416

I am reading a biography of Thomas Becket, the namesake for my newest child, and I came across this sentence early on:

Stephen's diarrhea was to change the course of history.

Such a perfect sentence. I read in part for the prospect of reading sentences like that. The Stephen under duress here is the nephew of Henry I of England. Henry's one legitimate son, William, was killed in the infamous White Ship disaster when the flower of Norman England ran aground in the English channel and everyone on board--save an intrepid butcher, a man named Berold and the poorest man on the boat, who held on for dear life to a spar floating in the water--perished beneath the waves. 

Stephen, understandably remiss to crap himself in front of the young royalty of the realm, had held back on the coast for a more private ship. His sense of decorum, as much as his diarrhea, saved his life.

He would grow up and challenge the man who became Henry II for the crown, eventually claiming kingship for a time before being dethroned. He would eventually fade into obscurity, but not without a fight. And it was all because of a little loose stool.

One of the most tantalizing things about reading history is the feeling that it so easily could have been otherwise. If Stephen processed his meal properly he dies on that boat. He has a condition that by all accounts looks perfectly accidental and it saves his life. That saved life then went on to cause untold duress to an entire kingdom. 

But history is so perplexing because it happened the way it did. Stephen got that diarrhea. He didn't get on that ship. And history was changed for it.

Books are awesome.

Christianity, Generational Difference, and DJT

I wrote a few weeks ago about the dubious reliability of headlines. In our clickbait culture, the more incendiary the headline, the more clicks. And, while the examples I catalogued there were more egregious than the one I'll be looking at here, the principle still holds. So here it is, from The Atlantic (Part of what is depressing to me in all of this is the Buzzfeedification of the entire news landscape. The Atlantic, for goodness sake's! Melville, Whitman, Emerson, Longfellow, Dickinson, Twain, and virtually every other American genius of the past 150 years was published there.)

This is the headline from a recent Emma Green article:

These Conservative Christians Are Opposed to Trump—and Suffering the Consequences

I started reading this because I've felt some of the pressure implicit in this headline. Not from the Christian school I teach at; our administration has been careful to acknowledge and validate the fact that there are a multitude of potential Christian beliefs on political issues and, therefore, the school will not try to adjudicate what its employees believe. Do we tend conservative as an institution? Absolutely. Is it mandated? Not at all; in fact, there are a good number of more liberal Christians on staff.

The pressure I have felt has come from social media, specifically anything I have posted that has been in the slightest bit critical of Trump. One "friend" went so far as to question my Christianity when I observed that Hillary Clinton's concession speech was more gracious than anything we could have hoped for had the shoe been on the other foot. Seriously. "Do you still claim Christianity?" was the exact wording of his measured response. Another got into an extended argument with me under that post before unfriending me altogether. Again, I've never posted anything that would suggest I voted for Hillary Clinton (which I didn't) or am anything other than a politically conservative Christian (I most decidedly am), but the biggest pushback I get isn't from my liberal "snowflake" friends when I post something pro-life but conservative ones who cannot brook any dissent against our Glorious Leader.

The actual article is far more interesting than the title would cause one to believe. The first two anecdotes are from a woman named Joy Beth Smith whose position at Focus on the Family was rescinded (she chose to be fired over accepting a severance) and Shannon Dingle, a woman who chose to leave Key Ministry, a Christian disability-advocacy group after being asked to refrain from incendiary, by their standards, social media posting. I don't necessarily like the fact that these women are no longer employed by these organizations, but it must be said that part of tethering yourself to an organization is accepting that, whether or not you want to be all of the time, you are a representative of that organization. 

Dingle's and Smith's social media posting seem pretty tame to me and not worthy of censure, but I can understand an organization with a conservative donor base not wanting their organization associated with content in any way antithetical to the organization. Moreover, it is not as if someone going to work at Focus on the Family can be surprised by the organization's conservative politics. I mean, come on. They were started by this guy. Green helpfully notes this pressure after giving the women's stories. I'll quote a pertinent bit at length:

Dingle’s story, along with Smith’s, represents a tension all non-profits face: How should they handle political issues that arguably aren’t directly related their mission? Social-media policies, including the official policy at Focus and the implicit standard at Key, are not uncommon. Organizations may have a reasonable desire to control their image and message on sensitive issues, including the statements made by their employees. HR matters are also complicated: Many factors go into discussions about employee departures, which can sometimes be invisible from the outside.  (italics added)

I've had to think through this even on this dumpy little personal blog that relatively very few people actually read. I often go out of my way to not mention the organization that I work for as I don't want what I write here to be reflective of that organization, but it is something I persistently think about. If I were to write something that were to somehow go viral, would I want the entirety of the content on this site to be fair game for judging my school? I can't say that I would be absolutely comfortable with that; in truth, I cannot even remember everything that I have written in this space over the past six years. For this reason, I control much of what I post on social media. I have a public Twitter account, but my Facebook I restrict to students (and coworkers) I know would not be offended by a hastily scribed opinion.

Green's acknowledgment that "organizations may have a reasonable desire to control their image on sensitive issues" is incredibly apt. Part of our intense individualism can cause us to forget that we are members of communities to which, at times, we must defer. It is only fitting that an employee of an organization consider how her organization is implicated by what she puts online. We try to teach our high school students this very thing: whether it is fair for them or not, they represent our school to the community and this is most true outside of the hours they spend inside our building. Green probably deals with the same thing, given her position at The Atlantic. In one way it is simply a feature of growing up. 

That being said, there were other parts of the article that were more disturbing. Audrey Assad, a Catholic musician and Syrian refugee, has been asked to, in her words, "shut up and sing" and leave political concerns, like caring for refugees, to the side and focus more on explicitly Christian issues. The problem here is that these are just her words. She hasn't quoted anyone saying any such thing; just noted that she has felt it implied. I am not saying that nothing of the sort has happened to her—it certainly strikes me as plausible. However, at this point Assad's accusations are merely hearsay. The story of Meghan Liddy, a missionary working with orphans in Ghana, is sadder. After writing in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, Liddy had multiple funding sources pulled from her ministry. There's some irony there—her donors believed presumably that the black Ghanian lives they were sending money to support mattered; the ones closer to home less so. 

It is a fraught time, politically, for the church. Many in my generation of conservative Christians have soured on the ultra-capitalist, the-church-as-Republican-Party-at-prayer ethos that dominated our parent's generation. Our concerns have broadened away, not from pro-life and pro-family causes which we still vigorously support (perhaps to an even greater degree than our parent's generation), but from the mindset that produced voter's guides on Jesus's preferred tax policy. This puts young Christians working at organizations comprised of leadership from the previous generation in a tenuous position. What looks like theological waffling to older believers is merely a change in emphasis. But all too often any dissent—no matter how mild—calls all of a believer's orthodoxy into question. "You don't support tax breaks for the wealthy? Do you even believe in the resurrection?"

Snark aside, I am sympathetic to voices on both sides. I wish these women—and the article seemed to quite intentionally focus only on women feeling the sting of the pro-Trump backlash—had more opportunities to voice the broad range of possible Christian opinions on controversial issues than they are currently being given. That being said, I also understand the reluctance of an organization to alienate their donor base needlessly, especially on issues outside of the scope of their organizational focus. I pray for the church as we figure this out. I pray for understanding on both sides. I pray, most fervently, that we stop airing this out on the internet and take care of these disputes in a manner more becoming of brothers and sisters as well as in a manner consistent with the Scriptures we treasure. I pray finally that mutual recrimination is replaced by mutual understanding, even if and when we disagree. How we handle the generational transition will be vitally important for the witness of the church in America. It behooves us to get it right.

Hamilton Threw Away His Shot

I finished Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton the other day. It was one of those lengthy biographies that I feel like should count for six books on my annual reading list. I want a gold star for finishing. Someone give me a damn gold star!

Anyway, one thing I was not expecting at the end of the book was the utterly pathetic nature of Hamilton's demise. Years collapse pretty easily when looking back 200 years and I assumed, given Aaron Burr's status as vice president of the United States and Hamilton's own political prowess, that this would be the modern equivalent of Mike Pence squaring off with Harry Reid (which would be kinda cool). In truth, Burr was a lame duck VP from the get go, a burr (get it?) in Thomas Jefferson's saddle that had no chance at another term and whose future political prospects at any level were increasingly dim.

Likewise, Hamilton had worked himself out of power with his war of words with John Adams, his well- and self-publicized affair with Maria Reynolds, and his general unwillingness to ever just, like, chill for a minute. Hamilton had no national presence and had retreated back into a lucrative but trivial New York City law practice. 

In other words, this was not a clash of Titans but a clash of has-been Uncle Ricos (Napoleon Dynamite reference FTW) thumping their chests in a pathetic bout of "honor." Burr was an opportunist who people figured out was an opportunist. Hamilton was a vital member of the founding and initial solvency of the union but his own worst enemy. They fought each other over a word: despicable. Hamilton supposedly used that word to describe Burr. Burr said, "Hey, wtf, bro?" Hamilton was, like, "Yeah, I don't remember saying that, but I'm not going to take it back if I did." It took them weeks to work through this. Both were near 50 years old and never once did one of them go: "Hey, this is crazy. Maybe we shouldn't point guns at each other in New Jersey because we're both arrogant, has-been d-bags." But, being arrogant, has-been d-bags, no one made that move.

So, on that fateful morning in July of 1804 that I mostly had heard about before the musical came out from this commercial, these two men lined up across from each other, pointed dueling pistols at each other, and Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in between the ribs. Hamilton, with an eye to posterity, went around in the weeks before the duel (again, this lingered for weeks; it is hard for me to stay mad for more than an hour about something) telling everyone to whom he revealed his plan that he planned to "throw away his shot." In dueling parlance, this meant that he was not going to shoot at Burr. He would aim his gun at the sky and trust Burr to do the gentlemanly thing and aim his gun at the sky. Then they would hug and go get ice cream or something.

Instead, Burr shot him and he died a few days later, leaving behind his wife and seven children. I struggle to see this a noble end. His death certainly exudes pathos, but the pointlessness of it all is overwhelming. 

It would make a weird ending to the book, which is why Chernow comes back to the story of Eliza Hamilton and her efforts to prolong Alexander's renown. Eliza lived into the 1850s, an inveterate abolitionist and orphanage philanthropist, dying before the war that tested the union her husband fought for so vigorously to a degree that her husband largely intuited. Therefore, the book gets to end on a noble note. But these last 10 pages could not undo for me the previous chapters, where we see a once great man brought down by his own pettiness and vain ambition.

One of the best songs from the musical is "I'm Not Throwing Away My Shot." It comes early in the play and focuses on young Alexander's ambition to make his mark in the world. In the end he didn't so much throw away his shot--though he literally did that in the duel--as squander it. He died pathetically and needlessly, and try as we might to hang posthumous laurels upon him, the miserable circumstances of his death have stuck in my craw. 

Look at My Son

At some point not everything in my life will be related to Hamilton: The Musical. At some point. This is not that point.

My wife gave birth to our third child last week. Beckett Alan Coffman. He's a cute fellow. My wife was amazing during the delivery (of course). We went to a local midwife clinic down the street from a hospital in case of emergencies. We left our house at around midnight to head in, he was born at 2:16, and we made it back home shortly after 6. Our kids didn't even know we were gone. They went to bed, oblivious, and woke up with a baby brother. Surprise!

Beckett mostly sleeps and eats and occasionally poops and every now and again opens his eyes. We are smitten, all of us. My oldest son was not yet two when my daughter was born. He dug it, but doesn't remember it. He's now 5-1/2 and my daughter is 3-1/2 so this one will stick for them. My daughter refused a Super Bowl party at her grandparent's the other night because she wanted to "stay home with my baby." She told him the other morning: "I will take care of you until you're all grown up and then I'll take care of you some more." It is darling and wonderful and lovely and all of the adjectives.

And one thing that has struck me in the past few days of wanting to tell everyone about my son and show them his picture and heap up superlatives as to his ineffability is how hardwired that impulse is in any parent. Look! We all scream. This is my child. 

I'll bring C.S. Lewis into this before I fall back on Hamilton. In his book, Reflections on the Psalms, Lewis explains at length this desire to praise that all lovers feel.

But the most obvious fact about praise — whether of God or anything — strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honour. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless . . . shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. 

The world rings with praise — lovers praising their mistresses [Romeo praising Juliet and vice versa], readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game — praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. . . . Except where intolerably adverse circumstances interfere, praise almost seems to be inner health made audible. . . . I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: “Isn’t she lovely? Wasn’t it glorious? Don’t you think that magnificent?” The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.

We praise what we love. We are inveterate praisers. Our love of something is bound up in our communication of that love. When I see people I can’t help but tell them about my son. It is, as Lewis says, a spontaneous overlow.

Lewis continues

I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is; to come suddenly, at the turn of the road, upon some mountain valley of unexpected grandeur and then to have to keep silent because the people with you care for it no more than for a tin can in the ditch; to hear a good joke and find no one to share it with.

My love for my son is completed, somehow, someway, in the praise that I lavish on his very existence. I would feel stunted in my love if I couldn’t share it, express it, consummate the enjoyment I get from him.

Now on to Hamilton. One of my favorite songs in the musical is after the war when Hamilton and Burr are singing to their newborn children. Hamilton’s first line in the song is, “Philip, you outshine the morning sun, my son. Look at my son, pride is not the word I’m looking for; there is so much more inside me now.” Clara argues that Lin-Manuel Miranda was able to write this song because of the birth of his own child in the middle of the composition of Hamilton. I maintained that creativity could account for the line, but after beholding my newborn son the other day I am leaning more towards my wife’s perspective. The line seems to require parenthood.

And Hamilton the character is right—there is more to what I am feeling than mere pride. It is something holier than that, something like a desire for others to participate in the beauty and grace of my son. There is a glory that emanates from his tiny body that has the power to illumine the darkness, that beckons us all to the light.

Ambition and the Teacher

I'm picking back up with some thoughts on ambition. You can find the other posts here.

When we were on our Hawaii trip a few weeks back my wife and I drove up to Hawi, a cute little hippie town on the north end of the Big Island, for a sushi lunch and some conversation. As we took our post-lunch constitutional, I started telling her about some of my writing ambitions for the year. Then we started talking more broadly about ambition. In career paths before teaching ambition was always a pretty straightforward matter. You work hard in order to move up the proverbial ladder. 

But what about a job where there is no ladder?

Sure, I can strive to become a department chair someday and maybe something like that will happen. But most other modes of advancement are out. I don't want to be an administrator because I love the classroom. I don't care about being recruited by a "better" school because I already teach at a fantastic school. I have no short-term plans for a Ph.D. or immediate ambition to teach at the collegiate level. Some of this stuff might/could happen someday but it is all Someday. And, there is no clear path to the achievement of this goal.

So it makes the career a perplexing choice for inspiring and fostering ambition. This is part of the reason I think that teaching can be a frustrating career choice for so many. In The Gift of Failure, Jessica Lahey notes that the average post-college teacher lasts just three years in the classroom. There are myriad factors behind this (too many to innumerate here), but I think at least an important one has to be that teaching can feel like a dead end gig. And while the popular claim that teachers typically come from the bottom third of academic performers has been, if not entirely debunked, then seriously called into question, the fact remains that teaching has fallen out of the public estimation as a noble and necessary career.  I have no doubt that some of this is fair and some of this is unfair, but whether justified or not the end result is that both good and bad teachers are maligned and considered, in the words of the old aphorism, as "those who can't do." Which can only serve to cement this notion further.

All of this makes it hard to know how to be ambitious as a teacher. Does it mean to focus solely on classroom excellence, lesson planning, and curriculum development? Is it something I measure based on student survey responses? Is the standard that I simply try to remain happy doing this job? Do I try to become a writer and someone known for educational philosophy or independent scholarship?

My guess is that it is some combination of all of these, though the latter one is hard to pull off. But I trust you see the bind. It is not a straightforward prospect and it makes those of us who are ambitious often unsure of what to do with that ambition. In no way does this decrease my love of this career--it is by far the best I have ever had--but it does mean I am going to have to figure some of this stuff out as I go.