Education Quote by Marilyn Hacker

Teaching, Marilyn Hacker suggests, isn’t exhausting because it’s hard to care. It’s exhausting because you must care evenly. The line lands with a poet’s precision: “more or less obliged” captures the moral coercion built into the job, the way attention becomes not just a pedagogical tool but an ethical requirement. You don’t get to follow your curiosity too far, or indulge the student who sparks the best discussion, or linger in the material that thrills you. The classroom demands a kind of democratic distribution of focus, and democracy, in practice, is labor.

The subtext is about the hidden economy of attention. In most creative or intellectual work, attention is selective; you chase what matters, what’s alive, what’s promising. In teaching, attention is also triage: struggling students need more, advanced students need challenge, quiet students need invitation, disruptive students need containment. “The same amount” is knowingly impossible, which is why the obligation wears you down. It’s the constant negotiation between an ideal of fairness and the messy reality of human difference.

Hacker’s context as a poet matters here. Poets live by discrimination: choosing one image over another, weighting a syllable, pruning. Teaching asks for the opposite impulse - to refrain from ranking what’s worthy in the moment, to perform patience as a baseline. The sentence is blunt, almost unadorned, and that’s the point: the fatigue she names isn’t romantic or tragic. It’s administrative, emotional, and relentless, the slow drain of being required to treat every minute as equally significant when you know, privately, it isn’t.