INTERVIEW SERIES: Seth

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT [edited for clarity]

Seth: “I sometimes worry about that a little bit—maybe too much—that I’m as excited about the content of [my classes] as I am about the process of teaching and helping the kids learn, which probably means that I lecture more in class, or I worry about getting through all the content and making sure the kids understand the books, even though I know understanding the book is at a lower point on the scale in terms of what’s important. I don’t know…I get pretty excited about what we do in class, and sometimes I worry about my impulses to be too enthusiastic about texts. But other than that, I still love teaching and find it to be engaging.

Very little of what you remember from high school is content. I think almost all of what you remember are people and certain sort of funny moments when things happen, and I think that’s more learning than anything else. I was a wallflower in high school. Much more socially aware and enthusiastic in college, but as I get older, I’m sort of reverting back [to being a wallflower]. It’s part of introversion. I do think that as I get older, I become more in charge of my social life, but I also have anxieties that crop up more often than they did when I was younger, interestingly enough. So it’s not just uphill. There’s also regression.”

Fantastic. 

S: “Yep. Party anxiety is something that probably is worse now than it was when I was in my twenties.”

Do you go to a lot of parties?

S: “No, no. But I find myself [at them]. You know, as a husband, as a father, as a colleague, as a professional, I have to go meet with people. I’m good with little dinner parties where I know the two or three people at our table but when it gets to be larger than that I tend to be not as comfortable with that. And then the kids come along, and they have all these friends, and I’m supposed to, like, remember their names! And their friends’ parents, and I’m supposed to remember what these people look like! They greet me, and say, ‘hey! How are you?’ And they remember my name and I don’t even recognize them. You know, I think I have a slight facial recognition issue…Sorry, I know, this is like therapy; this must be what happens when you’re meeting with all these other people that you’re interviewing.”

Yeah, no, it’s okay, ‘cause usually it’s the other way around. So, do you have any closing remarks? Anything you want the world to know?

S: “There’s nothing I want the world to know.”

How ‘bout advice? Do you have any advice for posterity?

S: “For budding people? …No, I’ve never been good at advice. It’s one of the things that, over the course of teaching, I’d watch other teachers give advice to students, and I would think a number of things, like ‘how do you know this?’ And at some point I sort of began to recognize that students want advice, even though I never know what kind of advice makes sense, or what would be good advice. So I think over the past few years, I’ve been a little more comfortable [giving advice]; a little more, ‘well, sure, why not?’ But advice sort of sounds cliché, like, ‘be yourself’—what does that mean? But then there’s people like Mr. Elder, who’s very advice-oriented as a teacher, and he does it with conviction, he believes it—which is what sells it—and also, it is the kind of thing that students will remember and will take to heart. Whereas, when I’m giving advice, sometimes I wonder ‘who’s going to believe this?’

I do think there’s some sort of recognition, when you get older, that in fact, despite what you may think about yourself, you have experience that lends itself to some authority to speak about something. That even though I don’t know when it happened, I have some sense of, for example, I’ve been a parent, so I know what it’s like to be a parent over some space of years. Part of it is confidence and part of it is just that nobody gives you a diploma for having experience, so you have to recognize that you’re old and experienced and thoughtful enough to articulate something that might be helpful to other people. There’s my advice. Except it’s not really advice. I don’t know what it is.”