First thing: I love to teach. Second thing: I love to teach because it is fun, challenging, intricate and fulfilling. Of course it is like any other trade–it has ups and downs, some days are good and some days are bad, and there are just plain regular days too. Well, this day was one of the great up’s. Maybe even the greatest up day I’ve had yet.

What was great? Well it’s this thing that happens once in a while when the stars align. It begins with waking up in the morning well rested and ready to take on the day. I love those mornings. And it only gets better. My students all seem to be equally well rested, they eat a great breakfast too. My lesson plans work like clockwork. The students are engaged and fascinated and they ask great questions. We talk about science, we go on silly tangents wondering about scientific things. ‘Mr. dave, what would happen if the sun was bigger? what if the sun went away? how would we get energy then?’ brilliant discussion with my middle schoolers! And a great chat with one of my high schoolers about the philosophical and ethical facets of teaching chimpanzees to communicate with humans. One middle schooler spontaneously tells me that I should stay here until they all graduate because I’m a good teacher. At the end of the day, my students are happy and their minds are active and they run out of the school to go play.

I sit down in my chair and look at my classroom, gaze out the window at the sea and the ice and the blue sky and I smile inside. I don’t know what to do with myself. It is that pure type of contentment that is positively splitting just like heartache is splitting. I guess that’s because it is a type of heartache. It’s too beautiful. I don’t want to work on prep, I don’t want to go take a nap, I don’t want to read a book. I want to sit and feel and I don’t want the feeling to go away.

If I had to summarize why I teach I would say it is days like today. And I’ve been thinking a lot about that. If you know me even just a tiny bit, or if you simply peruse this blog, you’ll know that I have this thing for flying. It is the dream I have had for my whole life. And the little bit of flying I’ve done has been even better then I hoped. When I fly there is a beauty I feel, beyond words, but it is no heartache like I feel now*. So there’s my quandary.

Yes, I would love to be a commercial pilot. I would love to wake up in the morning knowing that I would be flying an airplane that day. And the staggering magnitude of the craziness of being able to fly for a living would last me some time, maybe months or maybe years. But sooner or later I know that I would feel something missing. The heartache of that perfect day of teaching. I’m sure flying has some sort of equivalent ‘best day ever’ scenario but it could not match the smiles of my students after a perfect day here.

So–what do I do? I have a few vague ideas involving flying in the summer and teaching during the school year; but I’m not sure that’s sustainable. Flight instruction is a near-certain possibility, as is flying commercially during the summer and teaching during the school year.

So–what do I do? I don’t know, really. Thankfully I have time to think of and percolate ideas. If I keep up my summertime flying, it will be a good handful of years, five at least, before I could be a commercial pilot.

*I have a hypothesis: I think it has something to do with the glittering instrument that is the human soul (thank you, steinbeck, for those words) and the act of loving others, a thing that is not central to flying.