I didn't think fruit would sprout so soon. The prospect is exciting to me. Lemons on one side; oranges on the other. What a lovely day today. I like being around the house. P. was home too because he doesn't have classes on Friday. I graded a stack of MacBeth tests which I'd been putting off, while watching A Man for All Seasons on On-demand.
This morning's newspaper carried a story about a second teacher protest yesterday in front of our own BOE. The headline reads, "Teachers March for help to fix classroom conditions." The protestors "spoke of principals berating teachers, of teachers not having time to take bathroom or lunch breaks..." etc. A similar protest, which occurred a few weeks ago, appeared on the local television news, but I missed it because I was just coming in the door from working late. L. told me about it. There's some comfort in knowing that I'm not alone in feeling demeaned and dissed; other teachers are feeling it too, enough to go out in the open and march. There was also a letter to the editor from a teacher at another high school explaining to the naive public how the teachers are blamed for test scores when---believe it or not---some students don't care, go into the testing rooms and blow it off or put their heads down and go to sleep.
My epiphany of the week is the sudden awareness that it's not a question of whether I want to teach at my current high school, another high school, a different county, or at a college. I'm not even sure I like teaching at all anymore! This insight struck me as I stood outside by the pond trying to decide whether to apply for a position at the local college, or at some new high schools which are opening in surrounding counties. I simply couldn't work up the enthusiasm for trying for a new situation. Could it be that for everything there's a season, and my season of teaching, spanning almost 30 years if you count my graduate school teaching assistantships, has passed? If it has, that's okay; I'll reinvent myself in another career, somehow. But I think it's crucial to recognize how I really feel, if that's how I really feel. I also wonder if I really am a teacher at heart but am merely burned out, as anyone would be who has been teaching six paper-heavy courses for seven months and counting. My daughter-in-law, who's a brilliant and effective teacher, left teaching for about a year to work for a company, and ended up going back to the classroom. Maybe some of us teachers-at-heart need to be away from it for awhile to know whether teaching really is our calling.
L. is home now, so the weekend is about to begin.
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