So teaching gives me pace, and variety變化, and challenge, and the opportunity to keep on learning.
I have left out, however, the most important reasons why I teach.
One is Vicky. My first doctoral student, Vicky was an energetic student who labored at her dissertation on a little-known 14th century poet. She wrote articles and sent them off to learned journals學術期刊. She did it all herself, with an occasional nudge from me. But I was there when she finished her dissertation, learned that her articles were accepted, got a job and won a fellowship to Harvard working on a book developing ideas she'd first had as my student.
Another reason is George, who started as an engineering student, then switched to English because he decided he liked people better than things.
There is Jeanne, who left college, but was brought back by her classmates because they wanted her to see the end of the self-reliance house project. I was here when she came back. I was there when she told me that she later became interested in the urban poor（the+adj=一類人） and went on to become a civil rights lawyer.
There is Jacqui, a cleaning woman who knows more by intuition than most of us learn by analysis. Jacqui has decided to finish high school and go to college.
These are the real reasons I teach, these people who grow and change in front of me. Being a teacher is being present at the creation, when the clay begins to breathe.
A "promotion" out of teaching would give me money and power. But I have money. I get paid to do what I enjoy: reading, talking with people, and asking question like, "What is the point of being rich?"
And I have power. I have the power to nudge, to fan sparks煽風點火, to suggest books, to point out a pathway. What other power matters?
But teaching offers something besides money and power: it offers love. Not only the love of learning and of books and ideas, but also the love that a teacher feels for that rare student who walks into a teacher's life and begins to breathe. Perhaps love is the wrong word: magic might be better.
I teach because, being around people who are beginning to breathe呼吸=成長, I occasionally find myself catching my breath with them.
