In Memoriam: 2007
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.
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.
on January 6th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
Our society, with every passing moment, becomes increasingly self-centered, absorbed in our own perspectives and increasingly impatient for instant gratification in all parts of our lives. This behavior is magnified as though through a lens unto the latest generation of children, as are all behavioral trends.
So you’re quiet right, it is indeed a form of laziness. And its only going to get worse.
Then again, it was George Orwell who said, “Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” Maybe you and I are just getting crochety in our old age.
on January 12th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
While I agree with what you said, I think it actually stems from something a bit different. For the last 30 years at least, the primary focuses and advances in technology have centered on either generating or controlling the flow of information. It seems to me that there is no in-between in this… you either are a generator of information, a controller of information, or one who collects information.
By default, children are collectors of information. They have to be. What is different now is the sheer amount of information that assaults them. By increasing the information they collect, I think we have actually slowed their intellectual development, as they simply have far too much to try and process at one time. True, they learn to multi-task at a much earlier age, but I also think it is no mere coincidence that the increased diagnoses of ADD and similar “conditions” parallel the increased advances in information dispersal.
It’s an incomplete thought at this point, but one I haven’t been able to shake since I made this post. I do think that we as a generation have not taught children to take responsibility for themselves, and it’s something I want to address in the classroom as much as I can. But with the parents hovering, protecting and, in reality, enabling their children to continue being lazy, there isn’t an easy way out of it that I can grasp.