Having a "secret" impact

Being famous can’t be easy, and if you in addition are rich, well, you will always suspect people to be around you for the wrong reasons. (Right for them, perhaps, but so very wrong for you, that is.)

And if they are around you for the right reasons you always risk that confidence and trust will be broken in the future.

Anyway, I am not famous, I am not rich and I am very, very far from ever becoming either. I am not sorry about it, though, because I have this notion that it would have deprived me of more privacy than what I hold today.

What I do feel intrude my private sphere is the knowledge people in the local area have of me. Because of my job it seems like as if everybody knows who I am… I hardly know anybody but when I introduce myself I often get the “I know, I have heard about you”:

I hardly ever go out. Not because I do not enjoy being social and to have fun, but going to a public place to me often includes the charm of having a former (or present) student who wants to tell me about his successes and fortune and life in general.

One day I was standing in line at the cash in my local store, and behind me I could hear two women talking. They didn’t lower their voice or anything, so it was not like I was eavesdropping or something like that; it was just, you know, the kind of background noise talking between people often is.

Then I heard my name mentioned and my ears just tuned in, all by themselves. They were referring to something I had said in class. None of them were my student, but I recognized one of them as being the mother to one of them.

In this case it was all innocent and well received, as it was about what consequences it will have if you fail in one or more subjects, but it made me think.

I say and do quite a lot during my teaching every day, and everything is not necessarily all that well thought through, and sometimes I get lured into topics I really should not go into depths with (At least not in a classroom full of teens). Even worse, maybe, if what I say is misunderstood because I choose the wrong or bad wording.

I understood quite a few years ago that my profession has the side effect that I will be talked about by strangers every day. Every day one or more of my students will talk about me among themselves or to members of their families.

I just never thought that what goes on in the classroom would be something that people took notice of and cared to repeat, let alone point me out as the source and tell my name.