Chapter 91
Teaching Again
Six months after his retirement, Marcus began teaching again. Not at Pemberton he had properly retired from Pemberton and intended to honour that but through the university, where he had been offered a part-time position teaching an education module for postgraduate students entering teacher training.
He taught one module: Language, Identity, and the Classroom. Twelve students per cohort, two cohorts per year. Young people preparing to be teachers, most of them in their mid-twenties, most of them carrying their own experiences of education and what it had done to them or for them.
He taught the module the way Mr. Okafor had taught him: with high expectation and genuine attention and the consistent insistence that they say what they actually meant rather than what they thought was expected.
In the first session of every cohort, he asked them the same question: 'Why do you want to teach?'
The answers were various: I love literature. I want to make a difference. I had a teacher who changed my life. I grew up in a family of teachers. I don't know what else I would do.
He accepted all of them. He spent the rest of the semester testing which ones were deep enough to hold a life of the work, and helping them understand which kinds of answers needed deepening.
By the third session of every cohort, he had told them the story of Mr. Okafor. Not to make it about himself he had learned over decades to use personal material in service of a larger point but because it was the clearest example he knew of what a single teacher could do.
'You are going to do this for someone,' he told them. 'Maybe for many people. You won't always know it when you do it. You won't always get to see the outcome. But in twenty years, someone will be sitting in a room like this telling your story. That is the work. That is the full shape of it.'
They listened with the specific quality of people who understood that something important was being said.
He was sixty-three years old and still teaching, and this was exactly right.