"As a teacher you are more or less obliged to pay the same amount of attention to everything. That can wear you down"
About this Quote
Attention is a finite currency, and the classroom demands an impossible economy. The expectation that a teacher give equal notice to every student, every paper, every problem set, every administrative demand, and every crisis enforces a relentless distributive focus. Fairness requires it; the ethics of teaching are built on the promise that no one will be overlooked. But the psyche absorbs that obligation as a continual alertness, a refusal to triage, an injunction to keep every window open. Sustained over time, it drains both vision and stamina.
Marilyn Hacker writes from lived proximity to this dilemma. A poet, critic, and translator with years of experience in academic settings, she has built a career on exacting attention to line, form, and nuance. Poetry thrives on ruthless selectivity: the willingness to privilege one cadence, one image, one necessary word over all the others clamoring for inclusion. Teaching, by contrast, disciplines the mind toward a horizontal vigilance. The shift between those modes is exhausting. The same sensibility that makes a meticulous poet makes a meticulous teacher; the reward of care becomes the cause of depletion.
There is also the uncounted emotional labor. Students bring private urgency into public space, and the conscientious teacher continually calibrates responses, reading not only arguments but moods, obstacles, and silences. Add institutional bureaucracy and service duties, and the ideal of equal attention slides toward surveillance and self-erasure. The paradox is sharp: the work that nurtures learning can consume the capacities that make it humane.
Hacker’s line holds a critique of systems as much as a confession of fatigue. It asks what fairness looks like when attention is scarce, and what support structures would allow teachers to grant equitable care without burning out. It also hints at a writer’s self-preservation: to keep language alive, one sometimes must refuse the mandate to notice everything and recover the right to choose where the gaze rests.
Marilyn Hacker writes from lived proximity to this dilemma. A poet, critic, and translator with years of experience in academic settings, she has built a career on exacting attention to line, form, and nuance. Poetry thrives on ruthless selectivity: the willingness to privilege one cadence, one image, one necessary word over all the others clamoring for inclusion. Teaching, by contrast, disciplines the mind toward a horizontal vigilance. The shift between those modes is exhausting. The same sensibility that makes a meticulous poet makes a meticulous teacher; the reward of care becomes the cause of depletion.
There is also the uncounted emotional labor. Students bring private urgency into public space, and the conscientious teacher continually calibrates responses, reading not only arguments but moods, obstacles, and silences. Add institutional bureaucracy and service duties, and the ideal of equal attention slides toward surveillance and self-erasure. The paradox is sharp: the work that nurtures learning can consume the capacities that make it humane.
Hacker’s line holds a critique of systems as much as a confession of fatigue. It asks what fairness looks like when attention is scarce, and what support structures would allow teachers to grant equitable care without burning out. It also hints at a writer’s self-preservation: to keep language alive, one sometimes must refuse the mandate to notice everything and recover the right to choose where the gaze rests.
Quote Details
| Topic | Teaching |
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