On Headphones, Shop Vacs, Acorns, and Twenty Years of Service

We're nearly through the first two weeks of the spring semester at Penn State. I'm teaching four classes this term. We've gone over the syllabi. I've learned nearly 100 names. We're establishing classroom rhythms. Students will be submitting real assignments, real soon. It's happening. We're doing this.

This year is my 21st year teaching at Penn State. I know this because I received a small acrylic plaque in the shape of the number 20 to commemorate 20 years of service this past summer. The university also sent me an email with an online catalog of prizes so I could choose a reward. I selected a set of headphones. They're decidedly mid in terms of quality.

As a side note: I've always loved my job. What I mean by "always" is that I've loved my job 90-95% of the time. This feels like an extremely high approval rating after two decades. However, when I received an acrylic 20 and headphones as the acknowledgement of 20 years of service, I wanted to quit. The reaction was swift and visceral. I put the plaque in a drawer. I don't use my headphones. True story.

Incidentally, one of the prize options from the online catalog was a shop vac. We already own an old shop vac, but retrospectively, I now wish that I would have selected this option so I could say, "This prize system for years-of-service sucks," and mean it both literally and figuratively.

I digress. This was not meant to be the point of this post.

The real point of this post is that — despite the lame acrylic plaque and janky headphones that demoralized me to the point of wanting to abandon hope (and employment) at the year 20 marker — I'm now in the midst of year 21 and I still love teaching. I still consider ways to grow, ways to explain content vividly, ways to engage students in tangible ways.

This past weekend, I thought of a way to do this. It involved making an analogy about acorns and oak trees. Acorns are amazing. The DNA of an entire oak tree is housed in an acorn, and if planted in proper conditions, that one tiny seed produces mighty growth. (If you're wondering, my analogy compared the acorn to a strong residual message statement, which, in public speaking, is the singular message that an audience remembers after everything else about a speech has been forgotten. All the content developed during a speech — every example, explanation, and argument that a speaker develops and conveys — germinates from that tiny "acorn" of a clear, focused residual message. You don't plant an acorn and grow a tomato, after all. The growth needs to match the seed. Content needs to back the point.)

That's an extremely long way of saying that I was thinking about acorns last weekend. And, in passing, I stated to my husband that it would be nice if I had acorns to pass out to one particular class of students as a tangible way for them to remember this lesson.

I didn't venture into the woods to find an oak tree and gather acorns that day, though. Then overnight and into the next morning, we were blanketed by a light dusting of snow, which further solidified why I didn't give another thought to acorn harvesting. The analogy would stand without using actual acorns as props, I figured.

But the next evening when my husband returned from work and found me sitting at my laptop, he approached me with a smile and his hands clenched together. "As I was walking back to my car, I noticed that my feet were crunching on the sidewalk. Look, acorns!"

He poured two dozen acorns from his hands onto the table.

I said all that to say this:

It's year 21, and I still love my job. At least 90-95% of the time. But better yet entirely, I love my husband even more.