From Advertising Hack to Inspired Teacher, or How I Got My Soul Back

by Shari Dinkins

Mutual funds. Toothpaste. Liquor. Some days I pushed port; others bio. lab services. I wrote copy. I designed ads. I sat with boards of directors. I sat with small businessmen. I struggled with budgets of less than a thousand dollars; I luxuriated in budgets of over a million dollars.

I dressed in what I liked to call my “near-suit.” A mismatched skirt and blazer; a suit jacket with a sweater-like skirt in matching hue; loose linen trousers and a cropped suit jacket the color of army fatigue. I streamed into boardrooms in cowboy boots, a clutch of black boards under my arm. My long, tangled ash-blonde hair left a scent of expensive hair product in its wake. I smiled and sat, confident. Glancing around, I waited until my boss, the best creative director ever, introduced me. It was like Hollywood, Circe de Soleil and a prize fight rolled into one.

Advertising.

I lived, breathed and became advertising. Sitting at a computer late into the night, I would curse the copywriting muse that would leave me breathless and angry, one step away from a foot-tapping production manager. One day my senior art director was told to give up her tickets to the opera—-she would be working late. Advertising. The all-night monster. The two-weekends-a-month game.

I got tired: of working for products I didn’t care about; of selling services I didn’t understand; of feeding the corporate monster. Advertising was eating my soul. In fact, I couldn’t feel my soul. Hadn’t felt it for years. I tried to think about other careers I’d done: purchasing, administrative, waitressing. Sitting at my desk, I shivered. I was trapped. In an industry that did not care about people. That did not care about me.

I read newspaper classifieds, bided my time. Finally I saw something, “Tutoring.” No, God, no, I was not going into teaching. That’s for sure. I mean, of course I had English degrees, didn’t I? Two of them. But hadn’t I laughed at my Liberal Arts pals in college? Teaching! “Only those who can’t do, teach,” I had taunted. I’d never teach.

Yet, something about that ad. Something.
Sitting at my desk on another Saturday night, I thought. About the fancy mahogany desk I owned. And the matching bookcase, and the sideboard-—what was wrong with that? I glanced at the doorway, heard the groans and shuffling feet of my production crew, desperate to get another campaign out in the overnight to L.A.

God help us all, I thought. Dreaming about another campaign, I doodled on my pad. My expensive art pad. Another campaign. To sell what? I couldn’t even remember. But I was going to have to come up with something fresh, yet corporate, something artistic, yet businesslike, something… something. I was sitting there alone, chasing the idea, hauling butt for a product I hated. My brain hurt; but even worse than that, my heart hurt.

The next day I called the number in the classified ad. Got an interview. Sat in a beaten-up office in Burlingame in my near-suit, listened to an enthused 26-year old tell me about tutoring high-school kids. High school kids. I didn’t even know any kids that age. I couldn’t even remember what it was to be that age. But I smiled and nodded. Just like all those client meetings: smile and nod, make useless notes on a yellow pad, look thoughtful.

I sat through three six-hour training sessions with 26-year old experts on the verbal section of the SAT. Scribbling in the wide white margins of my “instructor’s manual,” I mused, “How could I have forgotten so much about English? I mean, I speak it every day, right?” I was in too deep, and it was too late. I left every night with a splitting headache, unable to sleep for hours. And awakened to mutual fund ads, port wine promos and blather about high-tech devices in shiny tri-fold brochures.

I drove twenty-five miles to a rich neighborhood in the suburbs. On a week night. Armed with a book on SAT techniques and a notepad. A yellow pad. A clutch of #2 pencils in my hand, I made it to the door and listened to melodious tones beckoning to the family. To the high school kid.

After shaking hands with a pair of overeager yuppies, I finally sat down to a beautiful teak dining room table. And began. Tutoring. Two hours later, I emerged. On the forty-minute ride home, I started to smile. I had found it. The thing. The thing I wanted to do.
Teach.

I could feel a tiny morsel of my soul waking up. I held my secret close, my little bit of knowledge. Teach. I want to teach.

I took on three more students, stretched myself until I thought I would scream. I worked for two semesters, trading off students as they worked through six sessions. High school kids. The ones I had forgotten about; the ones I had forgotten I was. They were never rude, though I sometimes goaded them, ribbed them, worked them past the SAT verbal to think. On their own, past their well-paid parents, their maids, their older sisters, their private music teachers. To think.

Finally I got an interview with the Dean at a well-known business school. I wandered onto campus, amazed. Dry-erase boards, clean bathrooms, new carpet. Not the schools I remembered. While she talked, her hair was illuminated. Lights from the business classroom shone through blinds. And I smiled, nodded, took useless notes on a yellow pad. Left with a headache and a certainty that I would not teach there.

The next day, a phone call. One English class. A night class.

Later she told me she’d hired me because I was tutoring-—and she had been a tutor. I struggled, floundered. Clutching a list of course objectives, I was relieved that the textbook had been chosen for me. On my first night, I came embarrassingly early, sat in the copy room—-no, we called it the teachers’ lounge. I watched the teachers. A flow of hardworking, sometimes frazzled men and women, through the doors, making copies, through the doors again. I checked my already-worn leather attaché: dry-erase pens (a set of eight), two bics, blue medium point, two #2 pencils, sharpened to a painful point, a few yellow pads, a pad holder stuffed with print-outs, a bulging folder of handouts for the night (40 copies each, just in case). Strolling into the class ten minutes early, I was surprised to see three students already sitting in chairs, swiveling, tapping their feet, staring at me. I moved to the board, wrote “English 100,” then underneath, “Dinkins.” Turning, I thought, “Here goes.”

And it started. The magic of the classroom. The nights when I went down in flames, laughed out loud at myself, and the nights when I had it-—when they had it. It was learning; it was give and take; it was spirit and ground.

Now I teach at three campuses. With tired chalkboards, erasers that have seen the 70s, walls that haven’t seen paint in ten years. And I use restrooms on campus that, in the old days, would have frightened me. I walk on worn linoleum, in cheap leather flats, to my third of an office, with a half a drawer in someone else’s metal file cabinet. Later I drive to another county, whistling, hands tapping out a tune on the wheel of my eight-year-old Honda. My blue hounds tooth jacket is worn, a yellowed-stripe of every day wear around the inside of the collar. My dark knit skirts hardly make it through the dry cleaner’s for another trip. Every time I take my tights off, I notice that my big toes have worked another hole in them. I heave my worn attaché to my shoulder and make the trip again. To teach.

Ah, there it is. My soul.