I think the primary function of cold on me is that I want to stay home and listen to Ketil Bjørnstad and David Darling and just brood on stuff.
I’m feeling a little weird, because I’ve broken through a boundary I’d hoped I’d never have to. You see, I have spent my entire career-life avoiding the big beast of School Districts. I mean, okay—I accepted that I’d entered the profession of teaching, even the ridiculous idea that grammar and literature were somehow equal in importance in this world, but to actually enter the School System seemed like going too far entirely.
I became an English teacher because at age 18 the only thing I wanted to do was read and write until i was too old and blind to do so. And I suppose I shuddered in horror at the thought that I might be expected to sell something or be perky for any length of time.
So I became a teacher because it seemed like something I could be into: spreading the love of reading and writing to the street tough and delicate goth girl alike. I was pretty good at it. Kind of bought into the “teachers are saints” idea—that teachers were sort of ascetics who did what they did because they loved knowledge above all else. (Yeah… no.)
When I graduated from college, the idea of working for a big district made me blanch. So instead I thought of going overseas to Department of Defense schools, teaching on army bases in exotic locales like Bahrain or the Philippines where supposedly you got a maid whether you wanted one or not. I couldn’t do that right off, though. For that, you needed to have two years’ teaching experience or a Masters Degree. The idea of staying in college didn’t appeal. I was sick of being poor. (Oh, poor me, who had to watch every penny for four years.) So I looked at all the Chicago Tribune classifieds and fixated on romantic teachery destinations like wagon trains for delinquents and the Navajo Indian reservation in New Mexico, where I tried to imagine myself living on a windy desert plain in a trailer with no plumbing.
I never ended up going off to the desert or the wagon train schools, but did always keep my career in small alternative schools where I was gifted with a large amount of autonomy, the ability to forget curricula designed by bureaucrats and stay attached to my idealism.
For a while. Then it was: do I really want to spend the rest of my life being an authority figure over children and young adults who are essentially being stunted by the whole monolith of industrial-era schooling? (Kids in alternative schools are often just “rejects” of the mainstream system.) There’s so much wrong with what’s going on there. But staying out of the Beast that are big school systems? That was a priority.
At one point, I left teaching entirely to work as a cabdriver, and then a lowly bookstore clerk. (These were supposed to fund my foray into a writing career, but as I ought to have known, lower-skill jobs take a lot of time and energy.) A few years ago, I ended up seeking the financial security of substitute teaching. It’s an easy way to have a job without having to go to it every day. If I want to stay home, I can; and I work as much as I need to to pay the bills. But I still managed to stay at smaller schools: private, charter, tribal. Anything to stay out of the Beast.
But now, on a sort of whim fueled by the foreboding of our financially bereft near-future, I applied to become a member of the School District’s substitute pool. It was either that or apply to work for the census, which, while probably interesting, pays crap. If I’m going to work for a bureaucracy, I might as well get paid as much as possible.
I like kids. I do. I look forward to hanging out with them and perhaps making their imprisonment less onerous for a few hours. I feel stupid to whine about having yet another job, but I am now employed in more “jobs” than I ever have had in my life, while still making well under the poverty level.
The one glaring thing about all this, of course, is that I can still count it as a personal choice. I have no right to complain when there are thousands losing their jobs every day with little to no prospect for replacement income.
[Looking for pictures to illustrate “substitute teacher”? Oy. Every page of images has at least two pornos and a mug shot. I kinda lost heart.]
Happiness 