Introductions and Intentions

My name is Robert Pollack and I am a student and teacher with the Mississippi Teacher Corps, a program of the University of Mississippi. As a candidate for the master’s degree I am being required to keep this blog, and I intend to maintain it beyond the requirements of the course.

So, why did I come to teach in Mississippi?

While at Saint John’s College I planned to pursue graduate study – perhaps in classics or Semitics, or some other subject that would leave me plenty of time with old books and old languages – and probably a career in academia afterward. But I also wanted to spend some time elsewhere first, preferably somewhere far away, in a place I didn’t know, with a different culture, and I hoped to be helpful there. In part, surely, this thinking followed from a simple itch to travel (which seems to be a chronic affliction), and an uncomfortable if oblique awareness of the bigness of the world and the smallness of what I know of it. And, though it be perhaps unbecomingly high-minded or idealistic, some of the early readings at Saint John’s were present enough to me that I felt compelled to pursue virtue more actively and for its own sake, if perhaps only after the manner of all idealistic young people, in whatever vocabulary they fashion it. So to these ends I applied to be a volunteer in the Peace Corps (and, for my academic interests, I hoped to be placed in North Africa or the Middle East).

After being interviewed for a Peace Corps assignment that I was told would begin the following year, I travelled to Buenos Aires and lived there for some months, studying Spanish and my genealogy, and meeting members of my extended family. I needed only a medical screening upon my return to the States and I would be scheduled to depart again, I was told probably for Africa.

Then I had the surreal experience of being in Argentina for the 2004 US Presidential Election. It seemed that everyone in Buenos Aires, friend or acquaintance or cabbie, was deeply disappointed by the results of that election, and many of them wanted to talk to me about it. I found myself being a representative of the United States, being asked to explain it and apologize for it to people who were puzzled and upset. I wanted to defend the US, to explain with sympathy its overwhelming paradox, its cultures and its politics, its liberality and its conservatism, its pride and its fear. Sometime in those weeks and months I decided in spite of myself that, though I had lost no interest in the Peace Corps and would love to serve for that organization, for now I could do in my own country what I would otherwise have done elsewhere.

Several facts influenced my next decision: since no later than high school I have believed that I would like to try teaching; my mother is from Nashville, and only once when I was a small child have I visited the South, though it is such a large and important part of the history and culture of my own country, and, by means of my mother, such a large and important part of myself; however much I love cities and urban life, I have nevertheless always romanticized rural and small-town living; and through a friend at Saint John’s I had heard about the Mississippi Teacher Corps, a program that many Johnnies have entered.

So I applied, and was accepted, and now write these words from the campus of Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi. I am student-teaching English III every morning and taking classes in education every afternoon. In August I will begin to teach English, and I am told maybe math, at North Panola High School in Sardis, Mississippi (a town of two square miles and about two thousand people).

I have been here for a week, and will be here for two years.