Nonsense, Drivel, and Balderdash

Reading over some old journal entries, I was reminded of the importance of record keeping. The journal that I read was from a summer camp I worked at five or six years ago. I had kept a pretty detailed record of people’s names and events and as I read them, I found memories coming back that I had long thought forgotten. The memories were jolted back: faces, places, stories and feelings. Reading an old journal is like getting a whiff of a particular soap or kind of wood and experiencing a rush of remembrance. Journaling is something that I do sometimes, but with so little time to write, I usually forgo record keeping in favor of other writing projects. It is something I should really take time to do, especially in this time before I leave my school. I will begin to forget a lot of things about my job, much of it purposely. I take comfort that many of my most traumatic students will be but a blur in 5 years. After all, I can only remember a single name from my time as a camp teacher,...

I didn’t expect my wife, a person who lives in a perpetual state of cold, to be the one excited about spending the night in a hotel made entirely of frozen materials, but she was positively gleeful at the prospect. With all the job uncertainty in the air, and not knowing what will be going on during my summer vacation, Jess and I decided to take our holidays during my February break. To me, this sounded like heaven. This winter has been brutal, and I could picture myself lying somewhere warm, water lapping at my feet and the sun on my skin; the only ice I would see would be the one filling the bucket of beer by my cabana. All set to buy our cruise tickets, we had to admit to ourselves that it was not wise to spend money on an elaborate vacation right when I was planning on leaving my job. So we began to look elsewhere for something to do with our winter break. One Groupon and one 9 hour drive later, we were pulling into our ice hotel outside of Quebec City. Staying at an ice ho...

It was 9 PM and only then was I heading home from work. It was the Thursday on the first week back from Christmas. I had done this for three days in a row, getting home with about half an hour to spend with my wife before finally collapsing into bed and falling asleep. I had arrived at work at 6:45 AM and left for home at 9 PM. A 14 hour work day for three days in a row. There are sweatshops that work their people less.  Being an English teacher is especially challenging because of how long it takes to grade English assignments. It isn't grading multiple choice. There is a lot of reading and writing required on the part of the teacher; even our short answer questions have a higher level of subjectivity in comparison with similar questions in, say, science. What this adds up to is time. Let me break it down for you: Right before break, each of my students had written a page long essay. In terms of grading, this means: 120 students + 10 minutes per essay (yes, it takes that...

S ince writing the last post, and since Christmas, I've had to come to terms with something about my current situation: it is untenable. For me, my current job feels like quicksand; the harder I struggle, the deeper down I go. I can see myself hanging on, but it would be at the expense of my mental health and general wellbeing. And so, without further ado... I have decided that this will be my last year at my job. It simply isn't a good fit for me: English: Officially, my class is called "English Language Arts," though why they bother including the word "arts" is beyond me. I am really responsible and held accountable for teaching the kids how to think critically. This is a good thing in its own right, but it bores me. I work with people who find it fascinating to break down particular thinking skills and attempt to teach them, but I was never an Education major. I was an English major. My masters degree was also in English Lit. I became intereste...

A funny thing happened just a few days into my Christmas vacation. It started as a flutter. A deep, increasingly constant feeling inside me, like a desperate, flightless bird trying to take to the air, wings pumping feathers and dust, noise and pressure, without ever taking off. My day was greeted by this feeling and I tried to push it down, ignore it, and distract myself with holiday affairs and the levity of family. But it was always there, lurking in the depths and recesses. I would lie down at night and feel that bird flap its wings once or twice in warning. “I’m not gone.” As the days went by, and the end to my vacation edged implacably closer, the feeling only got stronger, anxiety knotting up inside me, taking up more air, constricting my diaphragm. As much as I tried to unravel it, it wouldn’t go away. Towards the end of my time in Seattle, I finally figured out where this feeling was coming from. My cousin and I had several talks about teaching (she is also an educator...