We did not worry about the future. The ideal would be to join the Peace Corps; the practical would be to work on a doctorate… forever.
And then there was a third option. “Oh, God, will we have to be teachers?”
A friend in Michigan taught Latin at a Catholic boys’ school. She wrote that she had slapped a rowdy student on the head with a magazine. It was a comic anecdote, but I am sure she went home and cried. If you have forty boys in a class, and you are an attractive woman, there is going to be trouble.
The headmasters advertised in classics journals or begged the heads of classics departments to recommend graduates to fill Latin jobs. Did you want to teach at a famous prep school in New York? No, because the salary was $8,000. Did you want to teach at a prep school in Boston? No, because the salary was $8,000. And did you want to teach at a school in San Francisco? No, and you know why.
I got a job in a less glam city that paid $9,000. Yay! I had made it!
Here is how you live on $9,000 a year.
- You share a house with strangers. No. I was an adult, for God’s sake!
- You rent a cheap basement apartment in what seems to be a hip urban area only to discover that gypsies (really, that’s what someone told me) and addicts partied all night in the alley. I begged for a refund and left the hip neighborhood.
- You rent an apartment you can barely afford in a safe suburb. The apartment looks a bit bare: you have a mattress, a folding chair, and a bridge table on which to eat Progresso soup. You spend your weekends grading papers and browsing at bookstores. A paperback set of A Dance to the Music of Time! The latest Margaret Drabble! You are rich in books, but poorer than you were in graduate school. How is the possible?
Then we moved to a less glamorous city. My husband and I changed careers. We could afford furniture!
Anyway, here’s my motto for a t-shirt: Life is hard, and then you teach!