The older I get, the more I love teaching.

When I was starting out as a professor, teaching wasn’t my main concern. I was a good teacher, I’d like to think. I always put a lot of time into it. I spent hours prepping for lecture. I spent even more hours reading rough drafts of student papers and then grading them. I supervised dissertations. I was dedicated to the job and wanted to do it well. But these were secondary to my main ambition, which was to make my mark as a scholar and a writer.

When I turned 50—that was seven years ago—things began to change.

I became more careful about my time and relationship to academia as a whole. Throughout my 30s and 40s, in addition to my writing, I had been consumed by department and academic politics. I helped lead a bunch of struggles for academic freedom. I served as chair.

But now I realized that I was more than halfway finished with my life. It was time to start thinking harder about what mattered to me most. I retreated from the academic fights and struggles that used to take up so much of my time and energy.

I also began turning down reviews and assignments and invitations to present my work or contribute to volumes of essays. I grew impatient with academic talks and conferences. I grew impatient with myself for not getting to the work I wanted to get to.

Then three big things happened. First, covid hit. Second, my daughter entered adolescence, during the worst mental health crisis for teenagers we’ve ever seen. Last, one of my parents got very sick, and both of my parents needed a lot of help.

The combination of these things made me more attentive to the emotional needs of my students. Not so much their emotional needs outside of the classroom: I’ve always felt that professors are trained to teach, and there’s not so much we can do for our students’ lives outside the classroom. I also feel that a lot of the talk of students’ mental health tends to overlook how much a good and demanding classroom experience can help their mental health. While we all have to develop requisite reserves and muscles of empathy to be good and true friends, to be loving children to parents and loving parents to children, professors often mistake their role as pedagogues with that of friends or therapists. I’ve had the good fortune of receiving years, even decades, of therapy, and I can assure you that the two roles are not the same.

But there is an emotional dynamic in the classroom and in the learning experience. For years, I think I tried to deny that. I look over my student evaluations from my first decade in the classroom, and while I see frequent mentions of my passion as a teacher, I see equally frequent mentions of my reserve as a person.

It was probably my experience with my daughter as a teenager, observing her changing relationship to me and my wife and her changing relationship to school, that made me increasingly attentive to what my students were going through in the classroom, what they were bringing to me and to their papers and contributions in class.

In my earlier years as a teacher, I felt it was important to establish distance between me and the students. I still do: I don’t tell them about my personal or professional life. I don’t discuss my political opinions. I don’t try to make friends with them. But I’m more open to their personalities and their experiences. I take more delight in them as individuals. I enjoy their specificity, the distance between their experience and mine, their love of social media, the fluidity between their knowingness and naïveté, the way they can gently poke fun at each other, and at me. I allow them to bring more of themselves into the classroom, and in allowing that, I allow and admit more of myself, too.

Having said teachers are not therapists, I think back now to my first therapist. I began seeing her in the summer after my freshman year of college. I was a wreck. She was perfect for me. She was extraordinarily smart, very observant, and quickly made connections for me. She was also very reserved and distant and formal. I loved that about her. Her reserve and distance and formality gave me the space to open up.

A few years later, I went to see her again. I was in a better place. I noticed a change in her. She dressed differently, more casually, less buttoned up. Her hair was different. She exuded warmth and friendliness. She was more open. I didn’t like it.

I now look back at those two different versions of my therapist and smile. I’m really smiling at two different versions of myself, my myself then and myself now. Back then, I had an intense need—and it was a need—for distance and reserve. It was the only way I could make room for myself. But now, the presence of personality, whether in a therapist’s office or the classroom, doesn’t unnerve me the way it once did. As I said, by welcoming more of my students into the classroom, I’ve allowed more of myself in, too.

I mentioned in a previous post that my mom died recently. I’ve been thinking a lot about her, and have been posting about her on Facebook. At some point, I may bring some of those posts over here. But for now, I only want to say that my mom was an extraordinarily warm and loving person. She radiated an openness to other people, and they responded in kind, opening up to her about all sorts of things. Since she’s died, my sisters and I have been hearing the most amazing stories, from the telephone operator at an online pharmacy to the waitstaff at where she and my dad were living to old friends and relatives, of people whose lives were touched by mom.

I’d like to think that my newfound orientation as a teacher, the genuine delight I take in my students—in their ideas, in their stories, in their mistakes, in their silliness, in the camaraderie and community we seem to create over the course of a single semester—is my allowing myself, little by little, to acknowledge, bit by bit, more and more, just how much of my mother is in me. It’s probably a lifelong project. Like therapy. Or education.