Once Upon a Time, I Wanted to be a Teacher

For me, one of the most frustrating things about my college experience was that I spent so much of it having no idea what I wanted to do. As a result, I spent a lot of time floundering, and a lot of money switching majors. I didn't graduate college until I was 27, where most of the people I graduated high school with were done when they were 22. They were on to careers and lives that I couldn't even begin to think about because I still hadn't managed to finish school. But then it happened, I had this great breakthrough and realized that of all the things in the world that I had bounced back and forth between, I always went back to this thought that I could be a teacher. It was the only constant in all of my floundering, and after spending a LOT of time with the kids in the drama department that I spend time volunteering with, I realized that it wasn't just what I could do, it's what I wanted to do. So I set out to teach. I literally put my nose to the grindstone, working 40 hours a week while going to school full time and finding space in there to sit down and do all of my reading and homework so that I could graduate with honors in an astounding 3 years for what should have been a 5 year program. I poured my entire life into this one goal, and when I received my diploma I thought to myself "I have finally accomplished something worthwhile" and from there I got.....nothing. No job in my field. No prospect of a job in my field. In fact, my state was cutting budgets left and right for schools and I found that instead of applying for open jobs, I was watching jobs get cut down to nearly nothing.

So there I was, a teacher with no one to teach, and I found that what few jobs there were within my area were being snapped up by teachers from other districts who had tons of experience and were laid off due to their own budget cuts. I found new teachers I had befriended constantly worried that they were going to be laid off at the end of the school year and left with no job prospects at all. I found myself wondering, why does anyone go into this field? Why was I so keen to go into it? I can't think of any other career where the low men on the totem pole have to worry every single year that they'll be laid off, and have to go to another school and start over where again, they'll be worried constantly that they'll be laid off at the end of each year. It's a thankless job, and at times it can be just as frustrating and difficult as it can be rewarding. It isn't a 9 to 5. It's a 24 hour a day job. It's a job where calling in sick is actually a luxury because you can't always get a sub, and if you can you still have to get up and write lesson plans for them so that your class isn't in chaos all day. It's a job where you watch your colleagues buy shoes for the underprivileged students in their classes, while parents and outsiders call them "lazy". It's a job where one or two bad apples ruin the reputation of the entire profession, and instead of parents asking "What can I do?" they ask "Why aren't you doing enough?" so that the uphill battle never ends.

And yet, I still wanted to be a teacher. A part of me still does, but when I look at the state of education, and the lack of value placed on being an intelligent and productive member of society, I'm not sure I have it in me to fight that battle for the rest of my life. Normally I'm a "Rise up, Fight the System!" sort of girl, but I've been unemployed or precariously employed for the past year and a half, and the idea of going right back into that where every year is a question as to where you'll be working the following year....I just can't take more of that instability. Plus, I watch my friends who are teachers constantly trying to do more with less as their funding gets cut to the bone, and at some point they're going to be teaching without any supplies at all and no one will fight for their sake because no one values education as an institution anymore. It's like every generation is more and more apathetic about the importance of knowledge and eventually it'll just be people lobbying against all forms of schooling. I want to fight the good fight, and I want to pursue the one goal that got me through college despite all of the work and exhaustion. I want to say "System be damned, I'm going to be what I set out to be", but the truth is.....I can't. Not only do I not have the opportunity, as more and more teaching jobs are slashed every day, but I don't have the capacity to tolerate the constant accusations of laziness, or delinquency, or a system that wants to pay based on how well your students perform on standardized tests despite the fact that the tests are biased and don't take into account disabilities of students. And beyond that, they don't take into account the sheer APATHY of students. The students who care so little about education that NOTHING any teacher does can pull them out of it, and their parents who feed that apathy. I've had students who do the bare minimum to be able to play a sport, or who don't care about anything outside of their iPod and their video games. No one talks about those students, who are fully capable but simply don't give a shit about anything. But my pay might be based on whether I can change that attitude in the mere 12 weeks I have them in class each trimester? I can't imagine such a world.

So I did....I wanted so badly to be a teacher. Now, with the state of the world we live in, I just don't know that I have it in me to do it.

The End of an Era

Anyone old enough to remember the morning of September 11, 2001 can tell you exactly where they were when they heard that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. For people like me, who were just out of high school at the time, September 11th was the Pearl Harbor of our generation. It too became a date which would live in infamy. The difference is that while Pearl Harbor marked our entrance into a war we had been staunchly attempting to avoid joining, it brought with it a sense of purpose and for our brothers in arms who were already fighting the good fight, it brought a sense of hope that renewed forces would soon end this bloody war. Our experience in the aftermath of September 11th did not bring hope for a faster end to our conflicts in the Middle East. Instead, it brought new fear that we were buckling down for a long battle with no real end in sight. And it has been a long battle. The "War on Terror" has surpassed the time the world spent fighting during WWII, and the victories have been few. The nation, who rallied around their troops during WWII, questioned the purpose of our missions overseas. While Pearl Harbor produced what we have come to call "The Greatest Generation", September 11th has produced the most fearful generation.

After the President's announcement last night that the White House was confirming the extermination of Osama Bin Ladin, I started thinking about what that really meant for the American people. I started thinking about my 8th graders I taught last year, and how young they were when all of this began. For those kids, who were 4 or 5 back in 2001, there is no real memory of a world prior to September 11th. They don't know that you used to be able to greet your loved ones at the gate in an airport, or that there was a time when you could fly somewhere without having to remove your shoes. They don't know of a time when the NBC Nightly News didn't have at least one update a week involving "The War on Terror", and they don't know of a time when it wasn't normal for the government to be able to tap your phone lines. For children who have grown up in a post 9/11 world, they have known nothing beyond the nation of fear we've been living in for the past 9 years. It boggles my mind that we have been searching for Bin Ladin for as long as my goddaughter has been alive. So I begin to wonder, what will this world look like for these children who have known nothing more than a life peppered with terror alerts? I do not presume the alerts will end any time soon, but with this shift in the chess game that is the war could mean a world that looks very different for these children, a world that may be more relaxed for the first time in their living memory.

While thinking about this impact on the current generation of young people, Jason mentioned that we were lucky to grow up in the 90's, in a time of economic prosperity and a fairly mild political climate. It seems that the 90's are set to become an idyllic era, much like the 50's, where we look back and say "Those were the good days" despite the fact that everything wasn't necessarily as picture perfect as it seems in retrospect. But last night, after we got the first real piece of decent news relating to this exhausting war, I felt for the first time a spark of hope that maybe...just maybe things were taking a turn for the positive. I am not silly enough to think that taking out one man can turn everything around overnight, or that it will even turn things around at all, but now I have the small glimmer of hope that maybe things can change.

I would be remiss if I did not also offer credit to President Obama for the speech he delivered late last night. His very demeanor began to swing the tone of this conflict. No longer were we in the "War on Terror", but instead we were in the "War on Al Quaeda". One line that took the terror away from the American people and replaced it with a being that seems real. A human force, which we could have hope of defeating. By fighting "Terror" we were fighting a nameless, faceless entity, and how does one begin to defeat a ghost, especially when that ghost is housed within our own personal fear centers? Now we have a force to recon with, and in one sentence he made that sound possible. While the American people rejoiced in front of the White House, our President called this only a "Significant Achievement", not a victory. The way this was handled by the Oval Office was with poise and dignity. We are not through the woods, but it seems we've found a brief clearing.

Some Days, We Are All Princesses

It seems that since November, the media has been abuzz with gossip, speculation, and excitement over the impending marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton. There has been press about the preparations, the ring, and the dress, along with nearly any other minute and seemingly meaningless detail that may be related to the wedding. And we ate it up. We, as a general human populace, fell in love with the idea of this wedding just as the groom fell in love with his bride. Sure, there were a ton of people who whined and complained about the news coverage and held fast to the opinion that it was just a wedding and shouldn't be awarded so much attention, but I think on some level, everyone was curious about it.

But why do we, a nation of people who fought against the rule of monarchy, find such fascination with Royalty and all of the pomp and excess that comes with it? I blame Disney. Are there any of us who have not been raised on the fairy tale stories of the Grimm Brothers as presented through the saccharine sweet filter of Disney films? Of course we are fascinated with royalty! Our childhoods were built upon it! I can't think of any little girl who did not grow up wishing she could some day be a princess, or any little boy who did not dream of daring sword fights and far off adventure. The fact is, the British royals are the only connection we have to a romanticized time long past, a time that fairy tales were made of. And perhaps that's what makes this particular wedding so appealing. For once, it feels like the living of a real fairy tale. A normal girl with no claim to nobility somehow growing up to meet a prince and live a happily ever after that every little girl dreams of. Of course there is a clear understanding that happily ever after exists only in fairy tales, and the reality of a royal life is bogged down with duty, tradition, and a public scrutiny that few would envy, but we can't seem to detach ourselves from the pure fantasy of it all. We get to see fairy tales played out in front of us, and in some way it allows us all to imagine "What if that were me?" for just a short time. So on Friday, as so many sat glued to their television and watched the most talked about wedding of the decade, every girl young and old became a princess for a few hours. Every boyfriend, fiance and husband became a prince, and for a short time the fairy tale became real for us all. Maybe that's why people couldn't seem to tear themselves away from it. Plus, who doesn't love a good wedding?

And they all lived happily ever after...

Procrastination and Projects Don't Mix

All right, so remember when I was bitching about needing a project and then proceeded to do absolutely nothing to accomplish that goal? Yeah...me too. Although, it's not entirely true that I didn't do anything to accomplish that goal. I bought paint. I bought it, and then I felt deeply accomplished in my paint purchasing abilities. I then proceeded to allow the cans of paint to sit in the rooms they were intended for and collect dust. They were AMAZING at that. They collected dust like it was nobody's business. Normally I have more follow through with things like this, but for some reason the motivation died shortly after that paint purchase. I'd like to say that I was busy, or that I was caught up in something important, but the truth is that the reason my motivation died can be summed up with a simple math equation: me=lazy.

But, sometime back in the middle of January, we did paint the bathroom. This was partially because Jason got tired of me whining, and partially because Jason was annoyed that the closets downstairs, as well as the one in our bedroom, desperately needed to be painted to rid them of the weird musty smell they had when we first moved in. We hadn't been able to find a way to get rid of it no matter what we did, so we decided to paint because it was the only thing we hadn't tried yet. So, I said we should just make a day of painting and I could work on the bathroom while he did the closets. This was enough to make appease him and convince him to let me paint. So we did.

And the bathroom went from this, a dark room with gross pinky-brown paint and the darkest blue accent wall ever.

To this, a much nicer and calmer green, complete with new bamboo shade. I was pretty disappointed with the color, because it was more minty looking than I really wanted, but in comparison to the dark blue and brown, it's a HUGE improvement.

Then, a month or so later we were waiting around the house to go catch a movie with my cousin, and we had about two hours to kill before we could leave so I got bored and decided to start cutting in around the trim in the bedroom in hopes that it would motivate my lazy butt to actually do the rest of the room. I got most of the cutting in done, except for what I couldn't reach because I didn't have the time to move the furniture. I'm not sure if it's absolutely necessary to say this, but it didn't really work. For the most part, it did nothing other than leave me staring at a weird band of blue that was ringing my room. I guess the partially painted room finally wore Jason down, because today after we had mowed the lawn and cleaned out the garage, he came in and announced that we should paint the bedroom. So, after months of having a partially painted room, we finally got it done.

So the bedroom went from this, big giant dark room with the same navy blue and same ugly pinky-brown as the bathroom. The worst part about the original paint job was that no matter how clean the room was, the brown always made it feel like it was dirty. And it always felt so dark and closed in, which didn't exactly make it inviting.

To this. The blue photographs paler than it actually is, but it's a nice blue-gray that makes the room look much bigger and brighter. The white furniture and all of the trim looks nicer against the walls, and most importantly it looks clean. And, my green duvet cover doesn't look out of place in the room anymore, which is awesome because I love that duvet cover.

So there it is. The culmination of both my whining and my procrastination. The final product of the stirring of some amount of restlessness in me months and months ago. Now I'm glad I did all of the whining back then, since I'm really happy with the result now, but it probably would have been nice if I'd actually done it sooner. Oh well. Live and learn.

Five Things You Can't Live Without?

Yesterday I was reading a blog and saw that the writer had an entry about the five things she couldn't live without. At first it seemed like a fun thing to think about, but I was quickly struck by how shallow those five things seemed, and how much the answer to that question depends on where you are and what your circumstances are at that very moment. It made me think how her list, which contained items like a curling iron, face wash, a down pillow, coffee, and design magazines, really reflects the heart of American culture. All five of her things are material, and in the big picture that is the rest of the world, they don't matter. I know I shouldn't judge, because I'm as guilty of gross consumerism as anyone else in this country, but it sort of made me sad that of all the things in the world, these were the five she chose. Then I started thinking about what my five things would be, and would they be the same?

The truth is, if we limit this list to things I routinely buy/own and don't ABSOLUTELY need for survival (i.e. food/water/shelter) then I'm not sure I can come up with five things that I truly would never be able to live without. So far on my list I have books. That's it. I couldn't fathom a life without words and knowledge, so books would be on the list, but I don't really have anything else. This makes me wonder why someone else thinks that they really NEED a curling iron and couldn't live without it. Is their life truly summed up and determined by the presence of that curling iron? It makes me sad to think it might be.

My true list of five things, however, would have nothing to do with material goods, for the most part. If it's a given that I have the basics to survive, then my list would include many intangible things that people don't think about, but they need to truly live the life they are given, not merely survive it. So, in no particular order, my list is:

1. Love
2. Passion
3. The Great Perhaps, the possibility of adventure.
4. Beauty in the world
5. Knowledge

Those are the things I think of when I think about what I would never be able to live without. It's not about what money can buy, or what I think I need. In reality, our perception of "need" as a society is so grossly distorted that it's no wonder there are people in the world who see us as greedy and selfish. In so many ways, we are. We put value in what we own, what we can purchase, not what really matters. I'd imagine that if we asked this question of someone in Japan right now, in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami, their list would look very different than the woman who needs her curling iron and coffee. It makes me think that maybe we, as a whole society, need to stop and consider what is truly valuable and start actually valuing it.

Bitten by the Reading Bug

I decided to take a break from being political (I know, right?!) mostly because I'm a little weary from the struggle of trying to find ways to rise up and fight the system or whatever. So, I'm going to talk about something awesome instead. Growing up, I was a super avid reader to the point where my parents had a hard time keeping me supplied in books. This continued up until I started college and had little time for my own personal reading since I had so many English classes requiring me to read other books. Then I got out of college and life became very busy so I didn't have much time to read the (literally) hundreds of books that were lining the giant bookcase in my library. Sure, I'd read a book here or there, but I didn't have the time to commit to devouring literature the way I used to, and finishing a book took forever because I was tied up doing other things. But, lately I've felt like I've been missing my old reading habits and I've realized that 2 years without a vacation and an incredibly rough year in general have left me feeling really frazzled and in need of some escape, so I decided that I'd pick up some books and roll back into my old habits. I've been starting slowly, picking up a variety of Young Adult books that I've been meaning to read for a while now. I figure that picking up something short and not overly heavy in a literary sense will at least let me get through the books more quickly than I had been. The last "literary" novel I read took me over 6 months to finish, but I blame that on the fact that I felt like I was trudging through the text waiting for it to get interesting. Since I make a rule to finish a book if I start it, it took some time. Thankfully this hasn't been the case with my recent collection of books. I have swiftly whipped through Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and The Hunger Games trilogy, and I just started John Green's Looking for Alaska. Easy reads? Sure. It doesn't matter, they've all been great so far, and hard to get enough of. And, what's more, I feel myself getting back to where I used to be, where I consider not going out with friends because I desperately want to finish my book. I sit around thinking about the plot while I'm in the car, or when there's a lull at work, working everything over in my brain and trying to pick apart the strings that weave together the tapestry of a story. It's the first time in a while that I've felt like me, the whole me. Not just the fractured pieces of me that I've been trying to harness together for months now because some really awful events left me shattered, but an actual whole and working me. Bit by bit, story by story, I feel like the words aren't just putting the plot together, they're knitting me back together one tiny piece at a time.

This rekindling of my book obsession has triggered something else. I used to write. Not blog write, but actually write. I'm not saying I was a great writer, but I was harnessing this need to be creative and channeling it into something that felt good to do, I was taking the words that are constantly abuzz in my head and making them into something useful, something tangible that made me feel like I could turn ordinary words into something beautiful. Then one day, I just...stopped. I stopped writing and the words dried up and I was left with nothing. I never took the time to think about it, but I am realizing that maybe I stopped writing around the same time I stopped reading. I stopped craving words and at the same time, I stopped producing them. Now that I'm back with my nose buried in a book, I find myself overflowing with this strange desire to not just take in creativity, but to actually create something. I'm not sure what, at the moment, but it's building in me like a geyser, very slowly right now but I think if I keep this up, it's going to overflow into something, which I can hopefully be proud of.

So thank you Suzanne Collins, Steig Larsson and John Green for lighting a fire that had gone out long ago. I needed it.

America is Not Broke

America is not broke
We are broken...
We asked for your tired, your poor, your huddled masses
When we sealed up the borders, we started making them ourselves.
A nation fueled by greed
Where Corporate America will soon brand the citizens
Because they will own us, if the greedy have their say.

America is not broke
We are broken...
Where money means more than people
And people are becoming desperate
But there is money enough to go around,
Except that it's being held by a precious few
And they're not giving it up any time soon.

America is not broke
We are broken...
A nation that shuts down women's clinics
Because someone might want a legal abortion
In addition to their cancer screenings
And their annual exams.
But what does it matter? They're only women...

America is not broke
We are broken...
Where medical care is a privilege
Not a right.
Where we pay for medical insurance
So that companies can deny us the care we pay for.

America is not broke
We are broken...
But the people are tired of being broken
The people are tired of being ignored
And the people are going to rise.
Do you hear the people sing?
You will soon.

America is not broke
We are broken.