Tag Archives: education

Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained

February 20, 2014 D.A. Adams 6 Comments

One of the lessons I try to teach is the importance of taking risks. Not everyone has the courage to step off the ledge into the great unknown, but if not for the people who do, we would never progress forward as a species or a society. Part of taking the risk is exposing yourself to failure, and as a man who has endured my fair share of failures, I can avow that the sting of falling short is palpable. In this society, we tend only to celebrate and acknowledge success, and we have developed this sensibility that prosperity is solely the result of hard work. When someone fails, society at large tends to blame the person for not working hard enough or not having the mettle to succeed.

But failure is a natural facet of risk. Plenty of people have started businesses or written books or performed music, working just as hard if not harder than those with success, and still failed. Maybe the timing wasn’t right, maybe they mistook the market, maybe they just never got their break. But two things I have learned in my life: hard work does not guarantee success, and failure is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. Personally, I would rather endure a thousand failures than live with the knowledge that I didn’t have the courage to try. We as a society need to shift our thinking back to valuing efforts and attempts as much as we value success.

I’ve made the decision to leave education. It’s a risk, I’m aware. Instead of a guaranteed monthly salary, I will be forging ahead into the unknown of freelance pay. Instead of a benefits package, I will have to provide my own insurance and retirement. I understand those risks. The other night on Facebook, someone with good intentions questioned my decision. How will I provide for my sons? How will I survive? She worried that I would regret the decision. On one level, I understand those sentiments. At my age and having been through as much as I have, I grasp the value of safety and security. I get that some people need the stability of a salary and cannot fathom the concept of living without a guaranteed income for the future. I get that. I honestly do.

But despite the stability education affords (although that is dwindling daily under the business model), I find myself suffocating from the bureaucracy. Each and every day, the escalating problems within the system kill a piece of my soul. When I weigh the safety of a stable income against the toll it takes on my person, I no longer find it worth the sacrifices. I would rather risk absolute failure than continue down this path. There is so much more to life than a monthly income and job security, and with whatever time I have left on this planet, I intend to use my greatest gifts to the fullest extent I can.

For those who maybe worry about me, please know, I would not make this leap if I did not believe I could survive. There are mechanisms at work behind the scenes that I’m not yet at liberty to discuss, but please believe that this spring and summer are shaping up to be quite an exciting time. For the first time in a long time, I have real hope that my writing is about to become financially lucrative. While nothing is set in stone and there is still tremendous risk involved, I believe that the time is now. If I stay put out of fear of failure or insecurity about income, I will miss my window and wither away into a broken husk of a man.

So with that in mind, I’m stepping off the ledge, trusting that everything I’ve spent the last ten plus years building is about to come to fruition. I accept the risks, understand the gamble, and know that I may not succeed. But then again, I just might. Because the other side of taking a risk is that it offers an opportunity for a reward. It’s not that I write for money or fame or any of that nonsense. I don’t. I write because I must, because it’s the only thing that makes me feel whole when my children are absent, because people seem to like my characters and stories. I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life giving back in the form of teaching. Now, I’m moving forward solely on my creativity and writing, and I accept the risks involved.

Diatribes

I Do Not Apologize

February 3, 2014 D.A. Adams Leave a comment

I’m a creative person — a free-spirited, independent-minded, compassionate man who has spent my entire adult life attempting to carve out an existence in a society that rewards the seven deadly sins and punishes virtue. And I am fed up.

I do not apologize for rejecting corporate fascism. On fundamental levels, I disagree with the stifling, homogenous, shallow materialism espoused by the corporate infrastructure. I do not believe in the exploiting of cheap labor, the pillaging of natural resources, and the shirking of civic responsibility that too many companies embrace. I do not agree with the rigging of markets, the undermining of democratic processes, and the eroding of personal liberties pushed by these monoliths. I will not serve such a system and do not apologize for it.

I do not apologize for pursuing my creative ambitions. I am a writer, a storyteller. That’s who I am. I will not tolerate any human being disparaging my efforts because I haven’t yet seen financial success from them. If your life is so shallow that you can only measure a life’s quality in monetary terms, then I pity your profound lack of humanity. I pity your misfortune at always having to chase more and more and more because that path has no bottom, no fulfillment, no nourishment, no sustainability. The path to self-contentment lies not in how much shiny, useless stuff you can accumulate, but in what you do for others. That wisdom was discovered long before me, and time and history have proven it right more than once. I will remain true to myself, to whatever end, and I will not apologize for it.

I do not apologize for the way I work. You will never see 99% of what I do because all of that takes place between my ears. When I seem completely detached from the world, lost in a dream, distracted from the daily chores around me, that’s when I’m working my hardest because my mind is crafting something new. I refuse to allow anyone to criticize my processes because the proof is in what I’ve created. My reviews speak for themselves; my readers have reinforced my convictions. Just because you cannot see the gears moving does not mean they are not in motion. I work damned hard at what I do, and I do not apologize for how I do it.

I do not apologize for attempting to give back to my community. Yes, at this point, I am frustrated beyond words with the educational system. Yes, I am leaving the profession for good because I can no longer endure the encroaching corporate takeover. But I do not apologize for sharing my knowledge with others, for attempting to improve and enrich other people’s lives, for living a life that has been dedicated to more than just my own selfish interests. At the end of the day, I have helped fellow human beings achieve their goals, not lined the pockets of greedy billionaires, and I damn sure do not apologize for it.

I am fed up with people and a society so blinded by greed and selfishness that they are tearing down the greatest beacon of liberty ever to shine on this earth. I am fed up with those who have more than they need looking down their noses and criticizing those of us who don’t, not because we don’t try but because our efforts are not duly rewarded. I am fed up with self-righteous, elitist assholes with a staggering sense of entitlement believing as long as something is legal it is also moral. You better believe, that house cards is about to come crashing down. I am far from perfect, but I am a decent human being who works hard, sacrifices more than you will ever know for his children, and lives life on my own terms, and I do not apologize for any of it.

General Posts

A Crooked and Curving Path

January 22, 2014 D.A. Adams 2 Comments

As I begin my last semester as an educator, I’ve been reflecting on how and why I got into this profession. I’ve written before about my writing career, the stops and starts along the way, and these two careers are intertwined like a tree and vine. In 1989, I suffered a devastating injury, one that derailed all of my previous dreams and aspirations. Through the recovery and grieving process from that incident, I discovered a passion and aptitude for writing, so when I began college, I did so with the intention of becoming a novelist. In 1995, the year I graduated from Memphis with my bachelor’s, I also published my first short story. About six months after that publication, an agent contacted me. He had read my piece, thought I had tremendous potential (his words on the phone), and wanted to know if I had a novel. I shipped off the first three chapters of my rough draft, believing my big break had arrived.

He hated the book, and rightfully so. Looking back, I now understand that it was dreadful. At the time, even though his harsh rejection stung, I didn’t let it derail me. Instead, I rolled up my sleeves and studied my craft with more intensity and fervor than before. Within the next year, I published another short story and two poems (though I in no way consider myself a poet), and during that period from 1995 to 1997, my skills as a writer burgeoned more than any other period of my life. However, from those four publications, I earned exactly zero dollars, and I knew I had to find some way to earn a living. With that in mind, I chose to return to graduate school for an MFA in creative writing, believing that even if I couldn’t get my writing career off the ground, I would always have the terminal degree to fall back on.

My only real regret in life is going to graduate school. Without a doubt, that was the worst decision of my life. Perhaps my experience could have been different in another environment, but I entered it on a huge creative upswing, having multiple publications and incredible optimism. Within two months, all of the positive momentum was crushed from the pettiness of workshops and stifling negativity from my peers and faculty. To this day, I refuse to endure another moment of a writers’ group because of those experiences. Within six months of entering graduate school, my productivity went from at least one solid story a month to virtually nothing, and by the time I finished my first year, I had given up on writing completely. Because of the negative experience and also due to personal circumstances, I switched from the MFA program to just the MA degree to finish faster and get away from that environment.

That was when I made the decision to teach. Though my creative desires had been squelched, my love for language had not, and I figured that if I weren’t talented enough to create my own books, I could at least share my knowledge and passion with others. In the English Department at the University of Memphis, we had an excellent instructor training program, and during my year in that program, I developed the foundation that has served me throughout my teaching career. Part of what frustrates me about the current rush to replace traditional teaching practices with technology is that I know firsthand how many years of study, practice, refinement, and field trial has been poured into traditional education models, yet administrators are convinced that the new way, developed mostly by educational companies with an eye on profits, is superior before it has even been implemented. I find this rush to overly rely on technology in the classroom short-sighted and potentially dangerous, but that’s another topic for another day.

As I made the transition mentally from writer to instructor, fortunately, teaching came quite naturally to me, and for the first few years, I woke up each morning excited to go to work. I loved pushing my students to improve, to pay more attention to their thoughts, to develop an eye for details. I loved lecturing, sharing my ideas, and demonstrating techniques. I gave each class everything I had every meeting, and I was highly effective as an educator. I say this not to brag on myself as much as a warning to others. People like me who are effective and passionate about our profession are being burned out, used up, and sometimes pushed out in this corporate takeover of the system. That fact scares me for our future.

As I sit here, reflecting on my time in the classroom and pondering what my future may hold, I’m both grateful for the opportunity to have impacted my students’ lives but also resentful of the changes that have stripped the passion for this profession from me. It will take some time to clear this bad taste from my mouth, but I am excited to press forward into whatever the future holds. While I would not change my decision to teach because of all the positive experiences, I recognize that the time has come for me to leave behind this profession before I become a bitter shell. That’s all for now.