2013 Meme: Topic # 14 -- expectations from my youth
Day 14: What did you expect to be doing at this age, when you were young? How does it compare with the actuality?
But first: what the fuck is wrong with Facebook? Everything is taking a bazillion years to do, look at individual pages (including my own), load more wall items, upload a photo... ugh.
Okay. I remember doing this same topic last year, somewhere sandwiched in among the not quite 365 entries that high schooler had come up with. As I recall -- and as true, in any case -- I did not think about being a teacher, as a kid. I thought about being a writer, a translator of French, an archaeologist, and possibly a professor of history. I don't think I considered much else. I would have liked to consider artist, but I never felt like I had enough originality and creativity to do that. And I made progress towards some of those intended goals during college and afterwards -- I majored in French; I took the intro to archaeology course and then got frightened off by the final lecture in which grad students took turns telling us there were no jobs at all and if we were LUCKY we'd be doomed to running ahead of a backhoe or bulldozer that was putting in a highway or a Walmart. I got an MA (and am ABD, sigh) in history. I worked as a translator for a revolutionary left newsmagazine in Paris. But somehow, I have ended up a teacher anyway.
The weird thing is, I can see how it started to coalesce, this decision, bit by bit, wavelet by wavelet, until it was a tide I couldn't resist. In grad school, a housemate gave up his potential PhD in Art History and Archaeology (which we'd spent tons of time talking about; I can still geek out on archaeology for any length of time you care to mention) in order to Get a Job. He entered a credential program at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and we shifted our hours of late night conversations to teaching and education reform (actual reform, not the disgusting NCLB, which did not exist yet, anyway). I remember we spent time going around on the Ebonics issue, which I defended hotly, while wishing its champions had chosen a less foolish name. A false analogy with phonics did not help the cause.
Then, when I ran out of department support (in hindsight, probably not something I needed to really worry about: I could have cobbled together jobs that paid the same amount without TAing) I went back to my mom's in Chicago to finish the research and writing (Jesus fuck, I've just realized I can use Ancestry.com to look at the 1930 and 1940 census for Clarks, Louisiana, the epicenter of my research, oh, MAN, I am going to do that) I got a job tutoring at the high school I'd gone to -- Evanston Township High School. It was a great job. Only half-time, so not enough to live on. But twenty hours a week working with high schoolers one-on-one or in very, very small groups, on all kinds of subjects: different areas of history, English, French or Spanish... I enjoyed it immensely. And then something started happening all the time. I would create some tools to help me tutor kids on, say, The Odyssey -- the Robert Fitzgerald classic edition with the Matisse-like line sketch illustrations. Like, I found sixteen or eighteen passages that were absolutely golden from all over the book, and did a close reading with the kids ... for instance, the lines from the suitors' feast in Ithaka when Odysseus and his retainers bust in and kill them all, which include the first use of the unimaginably common phrase "bite the dust". And newish teachers, or some not new at all, would come ask if they could use my materials. My curriculum. This kept happening, and I started to feel like cutting out the middle-man. Why not become a teacher? At the same time, my sister had decided to become and elementary school teacher in Oakland, and she walked into a job, on just an emergency credential. That looked good to me, living back at home with my mother as an adult, and chafing to be earning an actual income.
I was sort of on the interview circuit for history positions, even though I hadn't started writing my diss, and I had a few interviews. At one (Doane College in Nebraska) they told me with supposed regret that they thought they were too white for me. True. At the other -- Traverse City, Michigan, a community college with UNBELIEVABLE funding sources, since it's such a tourist town -- they obviously had an inside candidate, but still flew me up to interview. That would have been a strange and interesting job. Distance learning via video to students in the U. P. Anyway, I wasn't too keen on teaching a class here and a class there, the modern adjunct migratory labor of the "freeway flyer". Ugh. And I felt like teaching public school was a more democratic option anyway, one of the few public services left in this country, and free and open to all children. Like being a public librarian, as my mother was. Also not an inconsiderable factor: teaching public school comes with a union, and union activism.
I intended to be a HIGH SCHOOL teacher, of course. But the first subbing position I got as a teacher on a sub credential in Oakland was for a middle school position, and they hired me in six weeks as a permanent employee on an emergency credential, and that was that. It's been middle school ever since. I still think longingly of high school, though. And peer through deeply rose-tinted lenses back at being a college instructor. The freedom! The joy of saying whatever you want in your lectures (yeah, yeah, as long as it is historically supported and relevant to the course description)! The ease of lecture format, compared to the entertainment factor and multiple methods we have to use in teaching middle school! I mean, my lectures were cutting edge, and visual, and audio... for 1996. For every lecture, I had a set of detailed, primary source mostly full-color, or black and white photographs, or political cartoons visuals that were printed on transparencies and projected to enormous size behind me at the podium. And I talked around and about those images, as well as bringing in audio clips or, once, singing myself. I even made a collective database project for social history through genealogy, as a project that showed exactly the demographic trends we'd been talking about, after students had first collected on paper and then entered into Filemaker Pro, four generations of their family, with demographic questions as well as the standard genealogical questions. Damn, that was fun.
But first: what the fuck is wrong with Facebook? Everything is taking a bazillion years to do, look at individual pages (including my own), load more wall items, upload a photo... ugh.
Okay. I remember doing this same topic last year, somewhere sandwiched in among the not quite 365 entries that high schooler had come up with. As I recall -- and as true, in any case -- I did not think about being a teacher, as a kid. I thought about being a writer, a translator of French, an archaeologist, and possibly a professor of history. I don't think I considered much else. I would have liked to consider artist, but I never felt like I had enough originality and creativity to do that. And I made progress towards some of those intended goals during college and afterwards -- I majored in French; I took the intro to archaeology course and then got frightened off by the final lecture in which grad students took turns telling us there were no jobs at all and if we were LUCKY we'd be doomed to running ahead of a backhoe or bulldozer that was putting in a highway or a Walmart. I got an MA (and am ABD, sigh) in history. I worked as a translator for a revolutionary left newsmagazine in Paris. But somehow, I have ended up a teacher anyway.
The weird thing is, I can see how it started to coalesce, this decision, bit by bit, wavelet by wavelet, until it was a tide I couldn't resist. In grad school, a housemate gave up his potential PhD in Art History and Archaeology (which we'd spent tons of time talking about; I can still geek out on archaeology for any length of time you care to mention) in order to Get a Job. He entered a credential program at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and we shifted our hours of late night conversations to teaching and education reform (actual reform, not the disgusting NCLB, which did not exist yet, anyway). I remember we spent time going around on the Ebonics issue, which I defended hotly, while wishing its champions had chosen a less foolish name. A false analogy with phonics did not help the cause.
Then, when I ran out of department support (in hindsight, probably not something I needed to really worry about: I could have cobbled together jobs that paid the same amount without TAing) I went back to my mom's in Chicago to finish the research and writing (Jesus fuck, I've just realized I can use Ancestry.com to look at the 1930 and 1940 census for Clarks, Louisiana, the epicenter of my research, oh, MAN, I am going to do that) I got a job tutoring at the high school I'd gone to -- Evanston Township High School. It was a great job. Only half-time, so not enough to live on. But twenty hours a week working with high schoolers one-on-one or in very, very small groups, on all kinds of subjects: different areas of history, English, French or Spanish... I enjoyed it immensely. And then something started happening all the time. I would create some tools to help me tutor kids on, say, The Odyssey -- the Robert Fitzgerald classic edition with the Matisse-like line sketch illustrations. Like, I found sixteen or eighteen passages that were absolutely golden from all over the book, and did a close reading with the kids ... for instance, the lines from the suitors' feast in Ithaka when Odysseus and his retainers bust in and kill them all, which include the first use of the unimaginably common phrase "bite the dust". And newish teachers, or some not new at all, would come ask if they could use my materials. My curriculum. This kept happening, and I started to feel like cutting out the middle-man. Why not become a teacher? At the same time, my sister had decided to become and elementary school teacher in Oakland, and she walked into a job, on just an emergency credential. That looked good to me, living back at home with my mother as an adult, and chafing to be earning an actual income.
I was sort of on the interview circuit for history positions, even though I hadn't started writing my diss, and I had a few interviews. At one (Doane College in Nebraska) they told me with supposed regret that they thought they were too white for me. True. At the other -- Traverse City, Michigan, a community college with UNBELIEVABLE funding sources, since it's such a tourist town -- they obviously had an inside candidate, but still flew me up to interview. That would have been a strange and interesting job. Distance learning via video to students in the U. P. Anyway, I wasn't too keen on teaching a class here and a class there, the modern adjunct migratory labor of the "freeway flyer". Ugh. And I felt like teaching public school was a more democratic option anyway, one of the few public services left in this country, and free and open to all children. Like being a public librarian, as my mother was. Also not an inconsiderable factor: teaching public school comes with a union, and union activism.
I intended to be a HIGH SCHOOL teacher, of course. But the first subbing position I got as a teacher on a sub credential in Oakland was for a middle school position, and they hired me in six weeks as a permanent employee on an emergency credential, and that was that. It's been middle school ever since. I still think longingly of high school, though. And peer through deeply rose-tinted lenses back at being a college instructor. The freedom! The joy of saying whatever you want in your lectures (yeah, yeah, as long as it is historically supported and relevant to the course description)! The ease of lecture format, compared to the entertainment factor and multiple methods we have to use in teaching middle school! I mean, my lectures were cutting edge, and visual, and audio... for 1996. For every lecture, I had a set of detailed, primary source mostly full-color, or black and white photographs, or political cartoons visuals that were printed on transparencies and projected to enormous size behind me at the podium. And I talked around and about those images, as well as bringing in audio clips or, once, singing myself. I even made a collective database project for social history through genealogy, as a project that showed exactly the demographic trends we'd been talking about, after students had first collected on paper and then entered into Filemaker Pro, four generations of their family, with demographic questions as well as the standard genealogical questions. Damn, that was fun.