Author and Columnist
Stephanie is my Sociological and Philosophical Foundations of Secondary Education teacher.
You have an enormous crush on Stephanie. She is twenty-five and takes the train from the city every time she teaches the class.
You write her inappropriately long and personal (as in, about you, never intruding on her life) emails, some of which she deigns to answer.
We like Stephanie, she is a pure soul. It is late, yet I still crave to be known by someone other than her.
Or her. You would love to be known by her.
Is there a moderately attractive woman in your vicinity whom you don't want to kiss?
First, away with the business at hand: I have not really befriended anyone enough in class to have partnered up with them for the writing workshop. Do you know of anyone sans partner who I could ask to read my essay and comment on it?
"Oh, good," I think to myself, "he included a letter he wrote her. This will surely not be something that will make me cringe so hard I will tear a facial muscle."
Now for the more friendly conversation!
I say this as an educator: please do not do this. Stephanie is a captive audience. Stop imprinting on the pretty, clever, sweet woman teaching you foundational education classes.
Do not have a friendly conversation with her. She is not your friend. This is unlike Dave since you didn't get moony when talking to him.
More or less this stems from the fact that I feel... kind of lost. I have a stern dislike for most other secondary education majors, especially after hearing my Foundations class (though not the teachers) praise a girl who insisted that she hated reading and writing
Wow, you did immediately adopt that anecdote, didn't you?
Stephanie may care about you as a student -- I like to think she must have -- but she is not required to allay your lostness. She is not even your advisor. She is an adjunct, so the college barely acknowledges she exists.
I could not go a day teaching without showing that I had a true love of the written word.
Mostly not to your students, though. The fact that I write and post/publish a five-digit number of words a week shows something. Love, maybe. Compulsion, definitely.
Especially teachers who hate teaching. I currently have one of those teachers, who feels the need to teach through laziness and fear (he does not lecture, just tells us to read stories and present them to the class, then he quizzes us randomly about our reading. He gave me a B+ on my midterm, then told me it was a D because I handed it in 15 minutes early which signaled to him that I didn't actually care about the essay I had just written).
What a positively awful thing to do, especially to you. You care about everything you write, which is why you can finish an essay quickly. You had likely been writing it in your head most of the day.
When you have to take an essay-based examination in grad school, they will give you all the topics a week before and say that only three will be selected. You reasonably write all the essays in advance to have a good idea of the arguments you wish to make and find the information to corroborate. When you sit for the test, you rewrite all three essays in an hour and do so well. When you explain your study method to one of the professors, they tell you that you were not allowed to do that and threatened to invalidate your test and fail you.
People who teach education are bizarre and divorced from how to interact with students.
Maybe this is why you crushed on Stephanie. She made you believe that teaching was possible and not painful. She liked her classroom and subject.
But when I look at it from the stance of a potential future teacher, I actually abhor him. He serves as an example to me of what not to become, not that I think his level of complacency and semi-sadism is within my character anyway.
As the educator you become, I concur. He was a miserable man and did not deserve to teach you. In all my years teaching, I've only encountered a few of his ilk, but he is on the short list of the worst of them.
I just looked him up. He is still teaching there and received his doctorate. May he have learned how to lead a classroom and interact with students since.
Looking at his RateMyProfessor, it does not seem he did. Several people comment about him being insulting, capricious, unprofessional, condescending, playing favorites, and demanding brown-nosing. He is rude and officious, even decades later. The most positive comments seem to boil down to "He told me to read books that taught me how to be a better teacher." One does not need to pay a man's salary for a book list.
He told another teacher of mine, one whom I like because she honestly loves talking about Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chaucer, that she should just quit her job because none of her students cared about Medieval English and were not smart enough to learn it.
What an absolute ass. I still fondly remember the Chaucer-loving teacher and how she was disappointed you didn't love Beowulf, which made you reread it to try to love it.
You shouldn't be writing this to Stephanie, mind you.
All she had done to provoke this was ask what plays of Shakespeare he was teaching so she would not overlap.
One cannot even speak to such a person.
If I were to ever reach this hatred of my profession, I would leave for greener pastures.
Or, in his case, get a doctorate and entrench in tenure.
I understand with tenure and the like, it is easier for teachers to ride out until retirement since they cannot be fired. Collect a paycheck every two weeks just for sitting and listening to some students erroneously prattle on about Willa Cather.
Your cynicism is founded here, though it often isn't.
Owing to this teacher, I nearly have to force myself to enjoy American Literature, reminding myself that e e cummings is not to blame (e e cummings is never to blame) and that I still care that Gatsby was corrupted by his dreams and his misspent love of Daisy.
You are trying a touch hard to convince Stephanie how well-read you are, particularly as you are not mentioning anything extracurricular.
If I give you a list of books you should read, could you get me a tenured professor's salary?
I want you to know that I think you are an excellent teacher, completely excluded from my condemnation
Yes, utterly putting aside that you want to kiss her on the forehead, Stephanie was an excellent teacher.
As I recall, the only time you missed her class was because you were so sick you were shivering and, when you somehow made it home, collapsed under all the blankets you could find until you sweated it out. And still you made it halfway through her class because you enjoyed it.
I consider you a friend, as well, as I tend to regard all the teachers I truly learn from.
She isn't your friend. I'm sure she was kind to you, but she isn't looking to befriend a student.
You are like a friend who grades me.
Teacher. Stephanie is a teacher.
I do not know where I will be most happy, doing what. One of my friends once said that I will better the world and change peoples live no matter what I do.
Unless one saves the world via sarcastic articles about serial killers and little-read fantasy novels, the jury is still out there.
I could easily get a job teaching the children of the rich but that feels like a cop out. I could teach English to disenfranchised, inner-city youths, but I am frankly scared of that life. It is too hard a life for me, in my current opinion.
So. You do teach the gifted children of the wealthy. You spend most of your career teaching juvenile felons, most recently murderers.
Does that scare you more than disenfranchised, inner-city youth? If it helps, it is less trying than being a substitute and pays enough that I have generous savings and investments.
I want to be around people who might actually want to learn, but still need to (yeah, find me the person who doesn't need to learn something and I will show you a great fool).
You should probably focus on your writing.
So, Stephanie... um... how is the weather?
She is your teacher. She is not your friend.
I don't think I need to repeat this to you.
So, as stated above, it has entered into the minds of Melissa, Emily, and me (with some help) to open a Montessori school or perhaps a daycare.
A dose of reality would arrest much of your anxiety (this is accurate for most things. Oh, how I wish I could instill some Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in that precious head of yours). This does not happen. This could not happen, but you worry about it no less despite its impossibility. If it did somehow happen, the grindstone around your neck this would produce -- and the obligation to stay with Emily professionally as well as personally -- would have made you miserable.
But it isn't possible. Melissa passed her GED -- and let us not get into her addictions, untreated mental illness, and irresponsibility. Emily is getting a Women's Studies degree. You are not administrators. No one would front you the money to establish a school.
Emily opens up a taekwondo school almost two decades later, the closest any of you come.
It is quite easy to say how first the idea entered our brains (Emily was talking about getting her own Tae Kwon Do school and various options open to her other than graduate school);
You are doing this whole Tell-Tale Heart thing that makes me wince. You are clever enough to get exceedingly bored, so I suppose I can forgive you for trying so hard to keep yourself entertained on the page.
I love to teach.
Do you? Show your evidence. You've never taught.
It was never wronged me.
It will!
I, however, know educational and child and adolescent psychology, coupled with group dynamics.
I will give you this one. You do know these things. You should have been a sociologist but were scared of taking a statistics course. Your kryptonite is anything that will make you feel less like a former gifted kid.
Oh, you would laugh to see how cunningly it does this! It moves slowly - very, very slowly, so that it may not disturb my sleep.
You truly aren't giving up the bit. Too clever by half.
for it is not the idea of working with my friend and living together that vexes me, but the Evil Doubts.
It should vex you. Can you imagine what it would be like to live with Melissa? At the bare minimum, the house would reek of smoke and would never be quiet. Her friends -- a few of whom might generously be called boisterous losers and drug addicts -- would be over constantly and at all hours.
I cannot think of a friend of yours who would make an acceptable housemate.
Even living with Emily later is fraught with domestic incompatibilities that suggest you get alone better when you see one another less. This might have been something that would have lessened with age and practice.
She once throws out your dish sponge, and you border on leaving her for being so inconsiderate since now you cannot do the dishes. (She also throws out Pepe the Disgruntled Nudist, your troll doll, claiming that the cat peed on it and she could not get the smell out. I do not believe any part of this occurred other than her throwing him out. Pepe the Second lives in your car, so she cannot get at him.)
Sorry, I was feeling... what shall I call it?... Poetic.
I will punch you in the throat.
So, for those of you that chose not to muddle through the above, Emily began originating a plan to create a Montessori school with our friends in an effort to make us fulfilled and erase her need to attend graduate school.
She attends graduate school for nursing briefly. I don't know that she achieved a graduate degree, though not for any lack of intelligence -- for whatever flaws she has, she is brilliant. Her degrees come more from stripes on her belt. She would rather be a Master than have a master's.
But I do not believe in my core that this will be so, and that saddens me greatly.
What a blessing these dreams are disappointed.
Why we did this? I suspect it was the work of Mothman. Perhaps the Jersey Devil. (Emily just discovered and I rediscovered that I have an obscene amount of information about "monster" sightings.)
So, given all your perseveraton on your path, guess what skill set ends up valuable?
That's right! Knowing about cryptids!
You have chapters in books about them! You are quoted in print about Bigfoot!
I am legitimately an expert in some obscure corners of the paranormal, though people creep closer to my knowledge. Still, I've been paid several thousand dollars to give panels about them.
If they choose not to employ me, and they may not given my answers and my hair, so be it.
They don't. Going in, they weren't going to. It is likely because your hair closes more doors than you realize.
It isn't fair, and I won't claim otherwise. However, it is the truth.
I somehow woke up in the wrong world.
This only accelerates. I'm sure I've alluded to the plague. Perhaps the reality show presidency and his conspiracy cult following.
9/11 germinated, but like the anthrax that inspired this concern, its spores can survive in dirt indefinitely. Over twenty years later, I still hear its echoes almost daily.
America no longer feels like the land of the free to me.
My dear white boy, it never was for most of the population.
"Homeland Protection Agency"? Tell me that doesn't have a Nazi ring to it. I do not know where we go from here.
Oh. There are Nazis now. They favor the reality show former president and pretend that the 1488 in their usernames is just an important date.
People got tetchy when a Wolfenstein sequel came out since it was about killing Nazis, something the original game was about, without anyone finding it worth mentioning. "Nazis bad" went from being obvious to a dicey political stance.
However, she and I are supposed to participate in a charity kick-a-thon about sixty miles from the service and then have lunch with her Master.
You skip Cat's father's memorial service for this.
This was not the right move.
So, clear issues and priorities need to be evaluated.
They should be.
You don't.