My sister Bernadette sent me a birthday card with a quote from Edith Sitwell: “I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty, but I am too busy thinking about myself.”
Since retirement, I have luxuriatied in the realization that I can stop promoting myself. People I meet don’t have to be told in some subtle or less subtle way that I am a cognitive developmental psychologist with this and that specialization and have held this or that professional position, have achieved this or that recognition, been responsible for whatever in the specialized world where I made my living. I’ve never been any good at it anyway. I hated doing it, and although I sometimes wished when I watched others that I could describe my own achievements in similarly glowing terms, I also found it somewhat distasteful.
Ah, but let me not subtly suggest that you are reading the blog of someone who is too humble to tell you about herself, covertly a retired professor from Harvard, perhaps, someone who has served on the President’s Council for Gifted Students, or a best-selling author whose name you would recognize behind the cloak of my pen name. If I blow myself up very big, I can make a number of things on my vita sound quite grand. But they really weren’t.
What I was, what I loved being, was a university professor, a teacher. I loved my students, especially I loved pushing my brightest students further than they ever thought they could go. My world kept expanding because they were pushing me as hard as I was pushing them. That’s really what I’ve done.
