Not altogether surprising, I have started off 2008 much the same as the last half of 2007… playing catch-up. Already I seem to have fallen behind and have more on my plate than I can possibly get done in the “required” time. Ahh, well. It is what it is, and I will, as always, get everything done. I may well lose some sleep in the process, but that’s ok. If there is one thing that my insomnia has taught me, it is that sleep is, most often, over-rated.

It was quite the diverse year, with unsuspected opportunities causing me to veer in a direction I was not, I realize now, altogether prepared for. I started out the year an unemployed graduate student. Having been laid off in 2006, I decided to go back to school full time and take advantage of my severance and unemployment insurance. Even through all my struggling actor days, I never spent more than a month or two at a time living off the government. This time, I took everything I could, doing the occasional odd job and some contract work along the way, all the while taking as many grad classes as I could handle.

Then something interesting happened… Through a series of coincidental events, I was offered a job teaching High School English. Not having a clue what I was actually in for, I jumped at the opportunity, cutting my graduate school load back to 1 class for the fall. To say it is more difficult an time consuming than I had imagined would be an understatement of monumental proportions. It is also the strangest mix of frustrating and satisfying I have ever encountered.

I was happy to discover that I really enjoy teaching, and I don’t think I am all that terrible at it. I have a lot to learn, to be sure, but I certainly don’t think I am actually doing the kids a disservice, which I can’t say for more than a few teachers I remember from my high school days. But as much as I enjoy it, it can be amazingly frustrating as well. Often times I find myself at a loss when trying to understand the attitude of quite a few of my students. It’s as if they expect me to pass along whatever it is they need to know, and they will just somehow absorb it through their skin and walk out of the room knowing all there is to know about whatever the topic of the day is. They just seem… lazy. Maybe it’s been too long, but I don’t remember being that way in high school. I wanted to understand. Simply puking information back at the teacher wasn’t an option for me, or for my teachers, for that matter. That’s where my largest area of improvement lies, understanding the expectations of the students. Well, that and time management. I really need some help there.

Grad School is still taking top priority in my life, as I really want to finish my thesis by the end of 2010. It’s very difficult with the teaching, but so far I have made it work, and that’s the most important thing. I am absolutely loving being a grad student. If I could find a way to be a full time student for the rest of my life, I would die a happy, happy man.

As a last note, because I enjoy keeping track of it, and also because I have undoubtedly ruffled the feathers of a few of my students by calling them lazy, I thought I would post a summary of my reading in 2007. It is on my (ever expanding) To Do list to implement a Library section to the web site, but for now here are the numbers:

Novels Read: 32 (11,583 pages)

Non-Fiction Books read: 6 (1,683 pages)

Short Stories/Essays/Poetry Read: 173 (2,738 pages)

Total Pages Read: 15,959

I would like to have gotten some additional Non-Fiction in there, but I ran significantly short on reading time during the last 3-4 months of the year. All in all, there are still far, far too many unread books on my bookshelves, and my list of books to buy grows daily.

That said, here’s wishing us all more time to read (and write!) in the year ahead.

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