Teaching is not like working at Taco Bell. Teaching is different. Teaching is the profession I love. But before I entered teaching, I had other jobs.

When I was a college student, back when it was much easier to do so, I worked to support myself and pay my public university tuition and expenses. My parents did not contribute, I took out no loans, and I lived dirt cheap while working poorly paid and inconvenient retail jobs. I did not hate my job at the University Book Store in Seattle, though it was not in the art supplies department as I’d hoped. No, though there was an opening in the art department, they put me to work in the music department. I had worked a few months for DJ’s Sound City at the Northgate Mall and was thus assumed to have “experience.” I tried to tell them I knew nothing about music, but Fran in HR did not listen. I would sell records and sheet music for the next five years.

I learned a good deal about music while I worked there. For example, I heard mbira music and Vaughn Williams’ “Lark Ascending” and Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” and Paul Horn Inside the Taj Mahal playing “Syrinx” by Debussy. One day a man came to my counter with a case and I begged him to open it and play his gold flute for me. He chose “Syrinx” and I nearly swooned.

The record store was not particularly well-run, and the book store was never generous with employees, but I liked working there. I spent my breaks mostly trolling the science fiction and fantasy book sections, or next door at Andy Shiga’s import store.

My first job had been at Taco Bell, a terrible job, but I learned to mop and wipe down and clean and make fake tacos and burritos. It had its uses.

At other times I delivered junk mail to houses, worked in a bakery, and sold quilting fabric. I designed logos and house plans freelance and I drew for an architect, who paid me less than I was worth. I taught in a community art center, a museum, and in private and public schools. I learned how to make florentines in the bakery, and I spent more on materials than I earned working most days in the fabric shop. My jobs have taught me that I do not usually enjoy working on commission or selling my own work. I would rather give that away. My jobs also made me curious about what I was doing and that led to lifelong learning.

Aside from Taco Bell, I never disliked work. (And the only thing I disliked about Taco Bell was my boss.) I did the best I could with every new experience, and perhaps because I never stayed in any job for long, I enjoyed myself.

Some people seem never to have researched or learned from their jobs. They “dread” going to work and “hate” their jobs. They are not curious, but just put in their time. I run into people in the service industry who do not seem to like the people they are serving, and people working in professions where they seem to have no understanding of that work. It makes me sad.

Aren’t they curious? Don’t they want to do a good job on the job?

No job or profession is consistently rewarding, of course. There were periods when I was teaching and felt underappreciated, overworked, and exhausted. My peers were not friendly. I felt unsupported and disrespected. Over the years a few parents, nearly always people who also worked hard, attacked me for not giving their child an A in class. (Now that I think about it, it’s always about the A.) I cried on my way home from work sometimes in the early 2000s, though much of that was dealing with my mother’s illness on top of everything else.

However. It was not actually my job that made me miserable. I was nearly always excited about my actual job, teaching teenagers. I never wavered in my love of teaching. It was the rest of it. Mean people. Like Taco Bell, making and wrapping a taco in 17 seconds was fine, capping little individual containers of hot sauce was fine, and even mopping was fine. My boss watched us with binoculars from his car across the street and shorting our paychecks? Kind of a brutish.

The anniversary of Kent State passed recently. I marched with many thousands in Seattle after Kent State in 1970. Some of the victims were not even near the anti-war demonstration on the Kent State campus that day. They were just walking to class. Sometimes I tell the story of my boss at Taco Bell telling me that those four students who died and others who were injured that day deserved it. I walked out to my mother’s car and drove away from the job.

I enjoy working. I have enjoyed every job I have ever had. Even now, I catch myself seeing employment ads and imagining the work. Even when someone comes along who makes me want to go hide under a rock, is yet another lesson. A bump in the road that does not ultimately interfere with the scenery.

The skills I got to keep for free.