mid-life career change

First Day of the 2007/2008 School Year


Today is the first day of the school year back in Des Moines. Well, it is for the staff anyway. The majority of teachers reported back at 8 AM CST. There will be meetings. Some of interest but most are a waste of everyone’s time and patience. Cleaning and organizing and catching up with coworkers that you likely haven’t seen since the last day of school in June. Lesson plans need to be made and class lists beg for perusal. I would have had my room and lessons ready to go by today. It was my habit to spend several hours a morning getting ready starting at the first of the month. I didn’t like the rushed feeling that only three days of preparation gave me. There really are few things more conducive to productivity than an empty classroom and a near empty building.

I think it was harder a few weeks ago than it is today, wrapping my mind around the idea that I will not be teaching this year. That, in all likelihood, I will never teach again. Though education is a subject that is near to my heart and I can be very passionate about, it is no longer where my heart lies. I had a supervisor who would often remark that it takes less than a whole day to forget what it is like to be a classroom teacher. Once you have left the building, you have truly left. Like Elvis. I suppose I will see now how true that is.

Twenty years. Is it possible I spent that much of my life with other people’s children? Where has that 23 year old gone? She really believed that she was making a difference. Interesting that I don’t miss her.

Happy first day back to my friends and coworkers in the Des Moines Public Schools! Go get ‘em!

Snow Days


Parking lot at Pentagon City, Arlington, Virgi...

Image via Wikipedia

When I was a kid snow days were a welcome reprieve in my tedious reality. I was not much of an enthusiast for school. I didn’t like the structure it imposed on my time. I was only interested in about half of what I supposedly needed to learn in order to survive in the great wide world.

I remember telling my father after my first whole day of school in the first grade that “it was okay but I didn’t think I would be going back.” I don’t remember if he laughed about that, but I am sure he did.

School is not exactly the first instance of life being scheduled for you, but it is probably the first outside interference in a person’s life that has to be adjusted to somehow. I adjusted in typical passive-aggressive style by simply retreating into an endless stream of books and scribbling furiously in the spiral notebooks that I never seemed to be without. I always looked industrious. It’s hard to take a child to task for reading and writing in most instances.

It’s funny how habits like those will stick with you. I employ this same tricks today to a lesser extent in an ever more futitle attempt to keep myself from questioning my committment to my job too closely or too often.

So, the overnight blizzard has blessed me with a snow day today. a welcome escape from my job. Teaching. Irony abounds. But it’s not like when I was ten and the only thing I was concerned with on such a morning was getting outside to sled and build snow forts. My disoragnized life glares at me from mulitple cluttered surfaces and housework silently accuses me of sloth. The only thing that calls to me from the great outdoors is a shovel and an impassable driveway.

Passive-agression loses its appeal when you are you own victim.