David Galef's "My 57th Recommendation Letter This Week" really cracked me up...a parody of graduate school recommendation letters that really speaks a lot of truth.

It's easy to get cynical about the graduate school advising process, but I genuinely favor helping students pursue graduate studies if they're dedicated to the discipline. I've written about strategies for writing recommendation letters before (and while I don't think they'll use it, the advice column writer from Esquire Magazine actually wrote for permission to cite the part about how to handle recommendations from students who you can't enthusiastically support!). It seems like the requests for these letters comes in waves from graduating students (and people who have long since graduated) since deadlines seem to be standard times on the calendar -- and the longer I teach, the larger the wave gets. So I can understand the cynicism.

Sometimes it's a chore, even when there's nothing you'd rather do than support the request, because of the timing. But I can't tell you how thrilling it is when a deserving student succeeds and makes it into a good graduate school. It's gratifying in a deep way -- I'd compare it to a long-term investment paying off, or the acceptance letter you'd get from a publisher for a book, but those metaphors cheapen it. The payoff is deeper than that -- you feel you've genuinely contributed to someone's life in a concrete way that makes all the work of teaching seem more real, more practical, more meaningful. For example, I got a phone call the other day from a great student who was excited to have landed an acceptance from a high profile Master's program in Cultural Studies and Literary Theory -- and I smiled all day long afterward, beaming with pride. As her advisor, I've known her since she first took my freshman composition class, and I've had her in virtually every course I've taught in the English program, and even a handful of independent studies. She earned this all on her own, but to have helped usher her into her future makes me feel like I've been doing something not only right, but good. I've felt this way before with a handful of other students I've worked with, some of whom are getting ready to defend their theses as I type. It's easy to forget that in the day-to-day grind, and though not every student in a classroom is a future colleague, some of them very well could be, and many more have the potential than we might realize.

I'm more optimistic than most, but I think you've gotta be an optimist to survive as a teacher. Many professors in English probably have a more guarded optimism about ushering a student into graduate school. Advice from many fields ranges from cynically pragmatic to the unabashedly pessimistic. The "life of the mind" is a great life, but riddled with many difficult problems. And it isn't getting any easier. Tenured jobs in English are difficult to come by, and extending one's loans and delaying one's "real world" career can only exacerbate the problem. But I have confidence in most of the students I recommend -- I know they can make it work, and I know that academia is the life for them, even though it may cause some suffering along the way. It worked for me, after all. And I thank all of my teachers for paying it forward...if I get tenure later this year, I'm going to sit down and write all of my old mentors a letter to let them know about their impact. They paid it forward; I'm paying it forward, too...but I can also pay it back.

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