Monday, December 10, 2007

Earlier this year I met a Marine and we talked about weakness. That the boot camp instructors’ job is not to teach specifics, but to weed the weak out of the group, those who can’t be counted on when the situation intensifies. It made me think if I would be weeded out, and just now, it makes me think of teaching: how a portion of students will decide a given subject is not for them, and the teacher might decide a given student isn’t going to make it. No hard feelings. One of the loneliest things I’ve ever heard were the long-distance phone conversations of an old roommate, a Marine, speaking in loud, halting English to a Filipino woman he hoped to marry. She couldn’t understand a word he was saying.