It’s been great blogging for you on the vice presidency, the debates, baseball, and sundry other political and nonpolitical matters during this four-month guest gig. I’ve been accumulating a pet-peeves list in hopes that it would get long enough to make a decent post, but I guess I’ve been in too good a mood to think of many. All I’ve come up with is: saying “two-thousand ten” instead of “twenty-ten” (and so on — we really need to make the transition before 2066); “early on” when “early” does just as well; and “election cycle” instead of, well, “election.” These are the latest in a long list of pumped-up words and phrases headed by “5 a.m. in the morning” and “medication.” More is less when it comes to language.

So let me wrap things up on an entirely different note, recounting two stories of early-career mentoring for which I am deeply thankful. The first is conventional, the latter much less so — call it “reverse mentoring.”

My graduate-school adviser, Frank Rourke, was the only truly wise man I have ever known. Well into my studies, I told him that I was about to take a year or two off to work for The Washington Monthly as an editor. Frank, concerned that my detour into journalism would prove permanent, took me out for a beer. “You know,” he said, “one of the great things about being a professor is that you’re always in close contact with young people.”

Being young myself, this meant nothing to me at the time. But over the years the wisdom of Frank’s remark has sunk in deeper and deeper. It’s a lovely thing about the academic life, this continuing involvement with 18- to 22-year-olds who are making the transition from youth to adulthood.

My second story is one of reverse mentoring — the power of a bad example. When I started teaching, I had occasion to listen at length to the late-afternoon discourses of a senior colleague. He was a person of genuine accomplishment who had been honored with the presidencies of regional associations, the editorship of major journals, and appointments at prestigious institutions as chair and dean. He had a devoted family. Yet his entire conversation was of the honors he had not obtained and the slights he thought he had received. His was not the classic pessimist’s view of the glass half empty; his was the misery of one unsatisfied by a glass nearly full. He had all the ingredients of a happy life and yet somehow had brewed them into misery. I resolved then and forever that no matter how much or how little I might ever achieve in the way of recognition, doing my best as a teacher, scholar, colleague, citizen, churchman, friend, father, and husband would be reward unto itself.