I’m Still Reading, Writing, and Teaching!

by Dave Schaafsma

“I’m Still Standing”–Elton John

Thanks to Sarah for inviting me to write an update to my blog post dated January 18, 2018, “You Can’t Drive 65: An English Teacher Reading in (Late) Middle Age.” I was 65, and am now 72 (do I have to now call this “old age”? So be it, I’ll own it) , and am still teaching English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, still doing teacher education, and still reading and writing on a daily basis. Did I imagine myself still teaching at this age, in my fiftieth year (!)? How could I have imagined that, and that (knock wood) I would still be happy, healthy and passionate about the work I was first hired to do in 1975. 

We are of course living in politically challenging, even frightening times, but my strategy for thinking about this always includes reading and rereading books, so the ones I have been reading ar ones that speak to fascism, authoritarianism, tyranny: fictional works such as Orwell’s 1984, Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Atwood’s The Handmaid Tale, but also non–fiction works such as Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny, Democracy Wakening by Heather Cox Richardson, Blowout by Rachel Maddow, Falter by Bill McKibben. Admittedly, these are heavy books, but I would say nevertheless necessary. I’ll say bluntly that ignoring the present problems is what Germany did in the thirties.

But think of the spiritual make-up of your self as partly created by reading as a kind of soup. I need the above ingredients, but I also need poetry, graphic novels, ghost stories, detective stories and picture books to balance out the blend. In the last two years, in addition to methods classes or graduate classes I taught undergraduate classes in ghost stories, climate change, detective fiction. Escape, comfort reads, laughter, joy, these are part of my reading self-identity, too.

Most of the writing I am still doing is continuing the daily reviewing of books on Goodreads. I see this as one extension of the teaching I have always done, and continue to do, to try to engage as many people possible in reading–reading anything and everything, to be a lifelong reader, for the purpose of knowledge, passion, empathy, wisdom, joy. An active citizenry requires both the intelligence to discern truth from untruth, but joy from despair.  So I’ll check in with you again at let’s say, 80 (knock wood) to see what I am reading and writing and teaching then!