Cooking and teaching are both everyday activities: you have to show up and make something happen everyday. Each weekday I plan a lesson (or two) and give it and see what happens. Most every day, Saturday and Sunday included, I plan a dinner and make it and see what happens. Both require daily thought and action. Both bring me into daily contact with people I care about, my family and my students. Both provide a new daily chance for improvement.
In my first career, I found working in software development could be too much living in the future: living and planning and coding for the next release that might be six months or a year away. It lacked immediacy.
In the book The Time Paradox psychologists Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd discuss different time perspectives people take on. You may live mainly in the past, reliving happy memories and revisiting old traditions or alternatively dwelling on the bad things that happened. You may locate yourself in the future, deferring gratification and working towards later fulfillment. You may center yourself in the moment, either as a hedonist or with Buddhist-style present moment awareness.
For me teaching combines the best of past, present, and future. From the past, I recall my own experiences of education: What inspired me? What engaged me? What can I bring forward from what I’ve learned to help my students learn? In the present, I show up every day, trying to bring my best self and my best energy to the students and to the material we’re studying. For the future, I write curriculum maps and lesson plans, think forward to the end-of-trimester and end-of-year tests my students will take, and gather data over time that I’ll be able to feed back into the everyday experience.
Sometimes the presentness of teaching feels like tyranny. What? I have to teach another class? I have to be ready for students again? But more often it feels — like cooking — like a celebration: a celebration of the moment and the present and what I can do with it.