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.

I Am Not Throwing Away My Shot

My intended series on ambition has thus far consisted of one post on Alexander Hamilton's life and a warning of the perils of ambition. To recount briefly: ambition can be myopia-inducing, causing us to focus on the aim of our ambition and ignoring or diminishing our other responsibilities. I ended by rejecting the notion that your ambition can be broad and be successful--opportunity cost always dictates that if we are focusing on one thing there is an infinite list of other things losing our attention. 

In this post I want to follow up on another thing that frightens me about ambition: failure. The old proverb to not put all of your eggs in one basket is relevant here. If I choose one thing--writing, say--as my thing and I pour all of my energy and effort into achieving success in this field there is an overwhelming chance that I will fail. And then what am I left with? A life with a single aim that fell short of justifying the effort. 

That sounds admittedly bleak, but I am not being fatalistic or sombre. That's the reality. Ambition is not ambition if its aim is not recognized success. I don't mean to bring the dictionary into this, but the definition of ambition is "an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame, and wealth, and the willingness to strive for its attainment." If my wife and mom think I'm a great writer but it never goes beyond that level of distinction--sorry mom and Clara--that's simply not enough to vindicate that choice. 

That's scary to me. It just feels safer to not try anything that great. To content myself with a modest existence. To quote Seinfeld, "Not that there's anything wrong with that," but at the same time it strikes me as unsatisfactory. Maybe that's because I'm still young. Maybe it's because I've never tasted failure on a grand scale. Maybe my mostly timid nature has shielded me so far from being ambitious enough to ever be hurt by ambition.

This is a post with no grand answer or succinct and pithy conclusion. I just don't know. It is one thing I constantly weigh when I think about ambition. And the question I am left with is if this fear is a warning to be heeded or an obstacle to be ignored and hopefully overcome.

Ambition and a Lesson from Alexander Hamilton

I mentioned in my 2017 resolution post that I wanted to spend some time thinking through and writing about the topic of ambition. This is the first such post. More will follow at irregular intervals.

It is no secret to those who have spent much time around me in the past six months that I have come under the spell of Hamilton, the Musical. The central figure of the play, founding father Alexander Hamilton, is nothing if not ambitious. He rises up from poverty and orphanhood on St. Croix to become what biographer Ron Chernow calls "the father of the American government." Hamilton, both the character in the play and the actual historical figure, was an unstoppable force, challenging American luminaries like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson while serving as an indispensable ally and mouthpiece for George Washington. He accomplished this by working constantly.

And herein lies at least part of the problem with ambition. Let's call it the opportunity cost of ambition. In order to complete the voluminous list of tasks set for himself both internally and externally, Hamilton perforce neglected other important elements of his life, most notably his family. In his biography, Chernow is careful to commend Hamilton as a doting father (when he was around), which is all well and good, but his ambition kept him from his family for long periods of time, led to a scandalous affair, and the pride in his accomplishments helped spur him into the ridiculous duel with Aaron Burr which cost his life.

This is my fear when I consider ambition. Not, I should note, that I will die in a duel but that ambition will lead me into too much single-mindedness and lead to me neglecting my family or my friends or my physical health or . . . The list mounts. Ambition freaks me out because I don't want to miss out on the vast realm of life experience that lies outside the narrow corridor of my ambition. 

Here I want to say that one option is just to be ambitious in every part of life: an ambitious father, husband, teacher, friend, athlete, writer, etc. I'd like to say that. But the problem is, that's bullcrap. Again, opportunity cost. If you want to be great at anything it takes a whole lot of time. A whole lot of time that is not being spent on something else and actively taking away from time that could be spent on those other things. All of the great men and women that we read about from history were single-minded. I can't pretend otherwise. You don't back into greatness. You cultivate it over years of sacrifice. You work to put yourself in the way of greatness. There is no other way. 

The corollary concern, of course, when it comes to ambition is failure. You put all of your eggs into one basket, work your butt off, and accomplish nothing. I'll talk about that fear a bit in the next post.

Resolved in 2017, to Fail More

OK, I'll admit at the outset that this is a gimmicky post title. I am not actually actively looking to fail in 2017. But I want to be bold enough to leave open the door for failure.

Here's what I mean. Over the past week or so I've been listening to Jessica Lahey's book The Gift of Failure while I exercise or drive around completing my various Christmas break projects. While in some ways it strikes me as having that one great transgression of most popular sociological/cultural books--taking a good idea for a long article and wringing a book out of it--I've thoroughly enjoyed the book as a balm from our accomplishment-oriented, failure-averse, credentialing culture. 

Lahey is only another in a growing chorus of disillusionment with contemporary childrearing and educational practices. Books such as William Deresiewicz's Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of America's Elite and the more scholarly Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum take aim at the narcissism and lack of curiosity bred in contemporary academia. Paul Tough's How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character and Angela Duckworth's extraordinarily buzzy Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance extend the analysis to early education and childrearing practices. Each argues that children in our system are shaped to be nothing but academic box checkers, beings honed to superficially placate and defer to the adults in their lives in order to attain to the next level of accomplishment. Kind of like playing a video game. 

Though I first heard this truism in connection with someone striving for partner in a legal firm, this cycle of accomplishment for the sake of attaining what's next in order to seek accomplishment in order to attain what's next, is like a pie-eating contest where the prize for winning is more pie. Such is our current dispensation. And what's missing is the willingness and the passion and the drive that opens the door to great and lasting success but, of necessity, leaves the door for failure open as well.

Though all of these broader cultural implications are of great interest to me, I want to make the focus more internal here. It is easy to recognize these broad trends and bemoan them (and I do), but this basic--and I don't know what else to call it--conservatism when it comes to ambition is primarily fear-based. We are scared to death of failure, which is why most of the time we do what is known and comfortable. Fear is basically how Chili's exists. And I don't want to live my life governed by fear, which is, as Marilynne Robinson points out, "not a Christian habit of mind."

Hence the gimmicky goal.

Again, my goal is not failure, but to be willing to extend myself enough that failure becomes an option. To, in other words, be ambitious. This means not watching much TV (even sports) and using that time productively to read and write and having crazy ambitions for that writing (more on this to come shortly). Whatever else it might mean remains to be seen. 

Partially this is to show my kids--who are being raised in the teeth of this risk averse culture--that there are worse things than failure. There's the refusal to try.

Endnote: I want to expand on the idea of ambition a bit more in a few subsequent posts. I am starting Macbeth with my sophomore honors kids this week so it's a pertinent philosophical issue. I want to think about ambition a bit from a Christian worldview--what it should or might look like