Striving and Thriving

In September 2018, I submitted my Masters thesis. The past two 1/2 years had been a season of utter imbalance. Each week I spent between ten and thirty hours working on course assignments. I knew, every moment, that I was neglecting one responsibility or another – either my teaching preparations were being overlooked, or my coursework was being disregarded – or my physical health was being neglected – Exercise, eating well, and even sufficient sleep sounded like strange and foreign concepts. My relationships with friends, family, and my creator were often ignored. I survived, but I rarely thrived.

However, despite the intensity of juggling full- time teaching responsibilities and my own schoolwork, earning my Masters in English has been positively life-changing. I learned and learned and learned. I engaged with Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charlotte Bronte’s The Professor and Villette, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and The Taming of the Shrew, amongst many other literary works. I grew to appreciate looking at literature through specific lenses, keenly focusing my attention on one or two aspects of a piece, such as the role of gender and social class in literature.

I grew to appreciate focusing on the female characters in many of these pieces, no matter how significant their role was in a plot. I wept for Harriet Jacobs as she was raped, sold, and talked about as a possession, rather than a person. I cheered with Janie, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, as she regained her voice through her marriage with Tea Cake, and as she came to value herserlf over the course of three somtimes miserable marriages. I applauded King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale for listening to Paulina’s wisdom in a time when women’s words were commonly ignored. I was appalled for Jane Austen, who felt compelled to cover her “manuscripts . . . with a piece of blotting-paper” whenever she heard “the crack of the door” (Gilbert and Gubar 153). The women in these stories (as well as many female authors) faced limitations on their actions and their thoughts that I did not understnd.

Before I started my master’s classes, I rarely considered how difficult it would be to be a female writer or intellectual in historical times, whether it be Biblical times, the Renaissance, the Romantic era, or the Victorian period. I did not know that early Victorian psychology (the focus of my master’s thesis) argued that women, including individuals such as Charlotte Bronte and Queen Victoria, were less intellectually capable because their brains were physically smaller than a man’s. This pseudo-science, called phrenology, also taught that women were at greater risk of insanity and mental illness than men. I had not considered how this widespread medical belief prompted men to restrict women’s actions and daily responsibilities. In an effort to protect women’s nerves from stress, women were highly limited as to how they could use their time, energy, and giftings. Most women were not welcome in academic conversations; their ideas were often limited to their solitary thought lives. For many years, women’s worlds were made small by widespread lies about the weakness of womanhood.

But these writers and the characters in these stories are anything but weak – they changed their worlds for the better, despite the time period and cultural limitations that many faced. I have been reminded, through reading, by how blessed I am to live in an age that is learning to value women’s voices. I am thankful that I have the opportunity to use my voice to change the world.

As I’ve considered these books & their authors, my academic confidence has grown. My hope is that the lessons I learned from this literature will help me to encourage the academic pursuits of all of our students. Each and every one of us have the ability to impact the world around us. As I continue to teach, I want to empower all students to pursue studies and jobs that suit their unique and powerful gifts and interests, regardless of which gender predominates the field; may we see more women studying to become engineers and lawyers and more men training to become teachers and nurses, if that is how they are called to change the world.

After completing my Masters program, I feel better able to develop curriculum for my upper school students. As I teach American Literature, I am better able to draw literary texts from African American and Native American authors, being sure to incorporate American writers of various ethnicities into our curriculum. I am more aware than ever of the need to discuss African Americans and Native Americans while reading works such as The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter. I now notice the Native Americans leading Chillingworth out of the forest, and I see Tituba, who has been forced from Barbados to serve Reverend Parris and his family. I have learned to recognize the significance of all characters, even these small characters, who are often overlooked. My courses have challenged me to think more about what it means to be a Christian, an American, and a female scholar. My hope is that I will better encourage my students to think about how to love all people, despite their differences in appearance of belief, a little bit better.

I’ve been blessed with the ability to earn my master’s degree; God has provided for my finances and he’s provided me with sufficient time and energy to complete my assignments. He’s grown my heart for all people through reading and discussing characters in these stories. He’s reminded me that He created every person, despite their socioeconomic position, their ethnic background, or their sex, in His image. After two and a half years of rigor, I received a graduation gift of time – time to sleep and time to eat. Time to cook healthy meals and time to catch up with friends. Time to go to church, to have devotions, and to reconnect with those I love. I’ve been participating with my Creative Writing students while they write poetry assignments. Last week we wrote Rondeaus:

A Wish Granted

I wish for time to smell a rose –

To drink in its smell with my nose -

If only I could watch clouds pass

as I lie down on soft green grass -

But my checklist grows; on time goes.

I want to stretch, to touch my toes

while wearing stretchy workout clothes -

I long for sweet tea in an icy glass!

I wish for time.

I crave a nap, a time to doze

A time to suppose while I repose

A’las! By tasks I am harassed

Bogged down by business from my class.

I wish I could chase my shadow -

I wish for time.

I’m ever-so-thankful that I was able to complete my master’s degree. I'm thankful for my steady teaching job that paid my tuitioon. I'm thankful, also, for leisure time.

As I looked back at my Rondeau, I was reminded of Ecclesiastes 3, which reads:

"There is a time for everything,

and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace.

What do workers gain from their toil?  I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet[a] no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God."

May we all seek joy in our daily routines, may we eat and drink and find satisfaction in our toils. May we recognize the gift of time.