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Tomasito Socrates (Tanya photo 2008)

My Life Work

Oh, what to do to earn a living?

Oddly enough, I had never really thought about what lifetime occupation I would hold to provide for my family. (What I would BE.)

Though higher education was just beginning to organize itself into relevance for careers, some old-fashioned people, including me, still regarded university education as a way to become wiser and not just as a more or less guaranteed way to land a better job.

I had my degree and sort of thought in the back of my mind that I would someday write something people would like to read—but the daily grind of writing under a deadline and the blatant snoopiness of newspaper work didn’t really interest me very much and I didn’t think enough in terms of plot and characters to write novels or plays. I sort of liked to read published journals of adventures like Dana’s “Two Years before the Mast” and Mark Twain’s “A Tramp Abroad”, and Melville’s “Typee”, but I realized that my own small-time adventures were too tame to interest anyone.

As a matter of fact, the very concept of “my life work” was so distasteful to me that I couldn’t conceive of anything interesting enough to hold me for an entire lifetime! I loved to be active, I liked to be doing things which other people considered to be work, but I didn’t like to work at such things! In fact playing music was perfect for me, though I never expected to be at it for the rest of my life!! I fact, that was my entire attitude toward work!

I LOVED learning to do new things!

In fact, I loved work—and the harder the better—so long as it could be approached as play!

One of the older and wiser Baha’is suggested to me that there was a new program starting out at the new campus of a new college in the new villages of Cotati/Rohnert Park between Santa Rosa and Novato that would train someone like me who already had a BA degree in nothing much of importance to be a teacher of elementary children with a State of California Teacher’s Credential and--most vital--I could begin teaching immediately­­­­––full time–– for pay (!) and take the necessary courses part time in the evenings and on week-ends. Not bad. Also the courses were cheap and I could get a government loan to cover their costs which would be cancelled if I actually taught school in California for a while after I got the credential.

Just the thing! I signed up for the program and was directed to apply to Penngrove School for a teaching assignment

I drove over some back-country lanes and found­--on a hill overlooking pastures and some shabby old wooden stores: Penngrove School–– a nineteen twenties school building with a basement and a couple of temporary classrooms for the kindergarten kids. The harassed principal needed a sixth grade teacher pronto since school was due to start in a couple of days and he had two classrooms-full of sixth graders and only one sixth grade teacher.

I was so new to the teaching racket that I didn’t even know that all school kids in California had been tested and tracked almost from the beginning of their education and the incumbent sixth-grade teacher, who had been there for years, had already reserved the best room, the best furniture, the best books and all the “good” kids for himself. I had all the leftovers, the junk furniture, the ragged textbooks, the misfits, losers, dumbbells and the minorities—in other words, all the interesting kids—in my classroom!

When the actual classes began, I threw myself right into the teacher trip with total abandon. I liked it. I really liked it!

But (and that’s a BIG but!) it took SO much energy!

Tomasito, 2009


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