My Common App for an Uncommon Job

Every year, students are asked to write themselves into being — to explain who they are and how they got here. It’s a tall order, especially when you’re seventeen and the world keeps shifting under your feet. So I decided to do the assignment too. What follows is the essay I’d submit if I had to apply for the job of teaching your kid. It’s the story of how I became the kind of teacher who believes a single moment can change everything.

My Common App for an Uncommon Job

I got an F on the first paper I wrote in college–a blood-red F half as big as the cover page. Three slashes. One for YOU. Two for CAN’T. Three for WRITE. I pictured the prof clenching his fattest Sharpie like a dagger, eager to do violence to my febrile effluvia. Though it was the big 80s, my professor, a zealous grad student, was immune to the zeitgeist, somehow having ducked the memo from Murray and Macrorie, tone deaf to the melody of my authentic voice. 

“Dude. It was about my grandma.” I flipped to the end. No comments. “Have a heart.” 

In a trance, hallucinating the job opportunities I would forgo, I walked to the registrar and changed my major to English. Now, I am an English major. Standard Academic English be damned. I could already feel the tweed scratching at my elbows. 

Next stop: Your writing style is turgid. It’s a year later, and, oh man, have I been trying to catch up. Turns out English majors read a lot and I hadn’t read much since Rumble Fish, and that only because I was terrified of Ms. Ricci, bane of the seventh grade. Turgid? Rest assured, I was properly offended–after I’d looked it up. I’m a college sophomore, more more than soph, but determined to keep trying.

Junior year, core curriculum completed, I enrolled in every available English course. I listened to my professors, listened to my classmates. “Ostensible,” hmmm. Jot it down. Look it up. Test it out on some engineering majors: “Calculus for Ubernerds? Dear sir, your ostensible taste in literature is appalling.” Cut to the Rocky montage–calendar pages tearing, book stacks growing like time-lapse saplings, fingers Fred-and-Gingering across a ramen-stained keyboard. Montage out: Conti’s iconic theme fading, the final ringbell echoing, a framing shot of me chugging cold coffee in my skivvies, transformed. Correction: Now, I am an English major.

Then two things happened that forever changed my life. One, for the first time, I saw an absolute phrase unfurling in the wild, a seemingly innocent collection of words–noun plus participle–wowing me with its syntacrobatics. Reading one of America's Best Short Stories circa 1988, I saw it. Nay, friend, I felt it, a stylistic tractor beam, its compact imagery seizing me until I nearly toppled then abruptly releasing me with the flick of a comma back onto the path of the independent clause. 

Two, senior year, my Early American Lit prof, whom I idolized for his erudition and irreverence, gave me an A on a paper. Me! An A! THE ONLY ONE IN THE CLASS! He commented: “You have a rare faculty for the appreciation of literature.” (That’s verbatim. Trust: I need only refer to the tattoo.) Now I knew I could do this English thing. I had arrived. Or had I? 

Decades later I'm teaching an intro to lit course to a wary group of students who’d failed the class in the fall. I’m lost in my reading of Robert Hayden’s heartbreaking masterpiece “Those Winter Sundays,” and my voice trembles on the last lines: “What did I know, what did I know/of love’s austere and lonely offices?” When I look up, one, just one, but still, one student is crying. 

Sure, that was mostly Hadyn. But then it happened again: the last day of a developmental comp class for college freshmen. Before he left, Raheem shook my hand, thanked me. At the door, he turned: “Professor?”

“What now, Raheem?” 

“I saw it.”

“Saw what?” I feigned exasperation; I liked this kid.

“The beauty of writing. I saw it. Because of you. Just once. But at least I got to see it once.” Then he walked out of my life forever.

Now, I am an English teacher. And here’s what I’ve learned: A single moment can change a writer’s life–and a teacher’s–and I’m here to help students find theirs.