"Cold christ and twisted trinities, what an anus."
Congratulations go to Me, for not updating this ridiculous thing in almost an entire year. I've sort of lost interest, but not entirely. More to the point, it's hard to post long rambly posts when you're freaking busy. Instead of giving you a point-by-point break down of every single thing that has happened, I will instead blather for ages about things that no one has any interest in whatsoever. Aren't you just thrilled, Imaginary Reader?
One of the biggest steps I have taken is freeing myself from Target. With other business that has been going on since January, I had been restricting myself to weekends only. This caused significant turmoil with management; they seemed to believe that during the weeks I was simply lying around scratching my balls or something. If ever I called in sick, heaven forbid, this was simply unacceptable. At any rate, since I found a different job (which I will wax on about in a few moments) and was simply tired of the damn place, last Saturday I turned in my two week notice. However, I came back yesterday to check and see if I had been removed from the schedule and to see if anyone had taken my last three shifts. In a rare twist of fate, not a single shift had been taken. This was vexing, but much more vexing still was that they still had me on the goddamn schedule through October 8th. Therefore, I simply decided to say "Fuck it" and not turn up today. And I'm not turning up tomorrow, or next Saturday, or any other day after that. They had almost an entire week after I turned in my notice to remove me, and they failed to do so. The only repercussion that I will incur is that I can never be hired by Target again. [sarcasm]The horror. The unmitigated horror. [/sarcasm] After being treated like crap by them for two and a half years, after being accused of shirking my duties by psychotic managers, after putting up with an endless parade of fantastic dipshits for the longest time, I owe them nothing. I was beginning to have panic attacks while at the registers. I would have a line of three to six people almost constantly while other cashiers around me were slowly puttering along chatting about bullshit with morons and the management would cancel any calls for backup from the sales floor. It was overwhelming; about a year ago I may have felt guilty about cutting and running, but I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about it now. I will miss some of my co-workers and a small handful of my regular customers, but they will survive without me. I have freed my own lance and I will not go back.
"So Doom, what will you do for money?" you ask. I have procured a job as an E.A. for St. Paul Public Schools. I will be working for Hancock Elementary once again, this time for the Extended Day Learning program on Monday and Wednesday evenings. Even with higher pay, I will not be earning as much on a per weekly basis. However, the monetary loss is more than made up for in the preservation of my physical and psychological health. This is something that is more in line with my planned career, and also coincides with something that I have been extensively involved in this past year.
Around the time of my last post, I was going into a first grade classroom at Hancock Elementary to do a grand total of 20 hours of field work for a class. Somehow it came to be that between December and the middle of June I ended up spending 550 hours in this classroom. And no, I did not get paid for it, so fuck off and stop asking. Once my fieldwork hours were over, I asked the teacher if she could use some assistance one or two days per week. She had almost no support in the way of E.A.s or T.A.s from the school and very little support from the cooperating University. Hamline University is across the street and gets paid federal money for some of their students to work in classrooms. There are also some collaborative programs where Hamline students can volunteer to be buddies with at-risk students; these "Hand in Hand buddies" are almost all fantastically unreliable assholes who show up once or twice then never bother to even say "This isn't working for me". Bunch of good-for-nothing pricks. Anyways. I also asked the other two first grade teachers if they needed help. Thereafter, I ended up coming in all day on Mondays to help in Karen Rickey's classroom, and I would spend an hour on Monday and Friday afternoons tutoring one of Gwen Larson's Language Academy students. It sort of spiraled out of control from there. My L.A. group grew by the end of January to four students (later to six by the middle of April), and I started coming in to Karen Rickey's room two, then three days per week. When classes were done in April, I began coming in every day and did this till the end of the year.
Once the 2009-2010 school year ended, I logged at least another 100 hours helping Karen Rickey during the 16 day summer school period in June and July. Upon her suggestion, this year I am helping in second grade with all three second grade classrooms. My daily schedule is kind of a nightmarish hodgepodge; I am supposed to move from one room to the next every half an hour as other people shift rooms, but often when I am supposed to move I find myself in the middle of working with students. As the year goes on, I hope this will become less of an issue.
I know the burning question for many people is "Why would I give up so much of my own time to volunteer when I could be working and earning money?" It is true, I could be working at Target full time to "maximize my financial earnings", but there is more to life than money. Target was making me physically and mentally ill; full time would have killed me. As I volunteer in these classes, I am gaining unbelievable amounts of applicable experience working with students. This will give me an enormous advantage when I actually become a licensed teacher and get my own classroom; it will even help me while I do my student teaching. I didn't get to work with students much even while I was actually working for the school; most of my work was materials preparation or clerical nonsense. Not only have I been working with students almost constantly while in the classrooms here, last spring Karen Rickey put enough faith in me that she allowed me to teach five lessons of my own design. Therefore, I got to actually use some fun lessons that I made for classes and my first graders got to do some fun research and activities with Dinosaurs.
I have still not entirely answered the question "Why?". I have been asked this even by teachers I work with, by the administration of the school, and I know the question will come up again and again. Well, look at the above paragraph for a start. On top of the valuable professional aspect, there is an immense personal and social aspect to my current work. I have found myself becoming so much more socially uninhibited, which is vital if I am to be a good teacher. Working with children so extensively and actually getting up in front of a classroom and teaching has helped me grow as a person by leaps and bounds. The most important thing to me is the personal connections I have made. When I began going into the classrooms, I never ever expected that the children I worked with would give so much back to me. I work with some of the most affectionate kids ever. I don't ever remember in school feeling inclined to give any of my teachers hugs, or to cling to them or hold their hands or any of that. I also despised school and looked forward to every possible time when I wasn't there; these guys are so different. They enjoy coming to school, they want to learn everything they possibly can and they give me hugs all the time. Some of them want to hold my hand or cling to me; on Friday one of the boys was pretty much cuddling with me while the class watched some video about butterflies. Our school's policy on touching/hugging/etc is that if the child initiates it, then it's fine. Even some of the kids I only met three weeks ago have already opened up to me and seem to trust me completely. Maybe today's kids are just more needy, maybe we were all jaded as kids, maybe it's because many of my kids don't have father figures at home, or maybe these little guys truly appreciate anyone who is nice to them and who they feel safe with. That's what Karen said; the kids just adore anyone who is nice to them, and I see absolutely no reason not to be nice to them.
Call me a parasite, but it does my heart good to feel the love and appreciation coming from even the kids who aren't very affectionate. It's a personal element that I feel like many people tend to overlook or discredit; everyone sees time as money, and that's their loss. So many people are stuck in shitty jobs where they shuffle papers for greedy assholes or something equally vile and inane, but it suits them because so many people are only cut out for shitty jobs. I say keep them there; the less they impact other people the less damage they can do. That point aside; this past year has been extremely busy, and I will admit also very stressful, but has been one of the best of my life because of all the little ones I get to work with. And all the stress and all the work and everything has only convinced me that I have chosen the right career.
Oh what else have I been up to? Pissing away money on things I don't need, reading books, playing video games where I get the chance, studying for classes, etc. None of it matters as much to me as preparing myself for my monsters. I think I will end this post here rather than rambling on for another few hours about nothing important.
One of the biggest steps I have taken is freeing myself from Target. With other business that has been going on since January, I had been restricting myself to weekends only. This caused significant turmoil with management; they seemed to believe that during the weeks I was simply lying around scratching my balls or something. If ever I called in sick, heaven forbid, this was simply unacceptable. At any rate, since I found a different job (which I will wax on about in a few moments) and was simply tired of the damn place, last Saturday I turned in my two week notice. However, I came back yesterday to check and see if I had been removed from the schedule and to see if anyone had taken my last three shifts. In a rare twist of fate, not a single shift had been taken. This was vexing, but much more vexing still was that they still had me on the goddamn schedule through October 8th. Therefore, I simply decided to say "Fuck it" and not turn up today. And I'm not turning up tomorrow, or next Saturday, or any other day after that. They had almost an entire week after I turned in my notice to remove me, and they failed to do so. The only repercussion that I will incur is that I can never be hired by Target again. [sarcasm]The horror. The unmitigated horror. [/sarcasm] After being treated like crap by them for two and a half years, after being accused of shirking my duties by psychotic managers, after putting up with an endless parade of fantastic dipshits for the longest time, I owe them nothing. I was beginning to have panic attacks while at the registers. I would have a line of three to six people almost constantly while other cashiers around me were slowly puttering along chatting about bullshit with morons and the management would cancel any calls for backup from the sales floor. It was overwhelming; about a year ago I may have felt guilty about cutting and running, but I don't feel the slightest bit guilty about it now. I will miss some of my co-workers and a small handful of my regular customers, but they will survive without me. I have freed my own lance and I will not go back.
"So Doom, what will you do for money?" you ask. I have procured a job as an E.A. for St. Paul Public Schools. I will be working for Hancock Elementary once again, this time for the Extended Day Learning program on Monday and Wednesday evenings. Even with higher pay, I will not be earning as much on a per weekly basis. However, the monetary loss is more than made up for in the preservation of my physical and psychological health. This is something that is more in line with my planned career, and also coincides with something that I have been extensively involved in this past year.
Around the time of my last post, I was going into a first grade classroom at Hancock Elementary to do a grand total of 20 hours of field work for a class. Somehow it came to be that between December and the middle of June I ended up spending 550 hours in this classroom. And no, I did not get paid for it, so fuck off and stop asking. Once my fieldwork hours were over, I asked the teacher if she could use some assistance one or two days per week. She had almost no support in the way of E.A.s or T.A.s from the school and very little support from the cooperating University. Hamline University is across the street and gets paid federal money for some of their students to work in classrooms. There are also some collaborative programs where Hamline students can volunteer to be buddies with at-risk students; these "Hand in Hand buddies" are almost all fantastically unreliable assholes who show up once or twice then never bother to even say "This isn't working for me". Bunch of good-for-nothing pricks. Anyways. I also asked the other two first grade teachers if they needed help. Thereafter, I ended up coming in all day on Mondays to help in Karen Rickey's classroom, and I would spend an hour on Monday and Friday afternoons tutoring one of Gwen Larson's Language Academy students. It sort of spiraled out of control from there. My L.A. group grew by the end of January to four students (later to six by the middle of April), and I started coming in to Karen Rickey's room two, then three days per week. When classes were done in April, I began coming in every day and did this till the end of the year.
Once the 2009-2010 school year ended, I logged at least another 100 hours helping Karen Rickey during the 16 day summer school period in June and July. Upon her suggestion, this year I am helping in second grade with all three second grade classrooms. My daily schedule is kind of a nightmarish hodgepodge; I am supposed to move from one room to the next every half an hour as other people shift rooms, but often when I am supposed to move I find myself in the middle of working with students. As the year goes on, I hope this will become less of an issue.
I know the burning question for many people is "Why would I give up so much of my own time to volunteer when I could be working and earning money?" It is true, I could be working at Target full time to "maximize my financial earnings", but there is more to life than money. Target was making me physically and mentally ill; full time would have killed me. As I volunteer in these classes, I am gaining unbelievable amounts of applicable experience working with students. This will give me an enormous advantage when I actually become a licensed teacher and get my own classroom; it will even help me while I do my student teaching. I didn't get to work with students much even while I was actually working for the school; most of my work was materials preparation or clerical nonsense. Not only have I been working with students almost constantly while in the classrooms here, last spring Karen Rickey put enough faith in me that she allowed me to teach five lessons of my own design. Therefore, I got to actually use some fun lessons that I made for classes and my first graders got to do some fun research and activities with Dinosaurs.
I have still not entirely answered the question "Why?". I have been asked this even by teachers I work with, by the administration of the school, and I know the question will come up again and again. Well, look at the above paragraph for a start. On top of the valuable professional aspect, there is an immense personal and social aspect to my current work. I have found myself becoming so much more socially uninhibited, which is vital if I am to be a good teacher. Working with children so extensively and actually getting up in front of a classroom and teaching has helped me grow as a person by leaps and bounds. The most important thing to me is the personal connections I have made. When I began going into the classrooms, I never ever expected that the children I worked with would give so much back to me. I work with some of the most affectionate kids ever. I don't ever remember in school feeling inclined to give any of my teachers hugs, or to cling to them or hold their hands or any of that. I also despised school and looked forward to every possible time when I wasn't there; these guys are so different. They enjoy coming to school, they want to learn everything they possibly can and they give me hugs all the time. Some of them want to hold my hand or cling to me; on Friday one of the boys was pretty much cuddling with me while the class watched some video about butterflies. Our school's policy on touching/hugging/etc is that if the child initiates it, then it's fine. Even some of the kids I only met three weeks ago have already opened up to me and seem to trust me completely. Maybe today's kids are just more needy, maybe we were all jaded as kids, maybe it's because many of my kids don't have father figures at home, or maybe these little guys truly appreciate anyone who is nice to them and who they feel safe with. That's what Karen said; the kids just adore anyone who is nice to them, and I see absolutely no reason not to be nice to them.
Call me a parasite, but it does my heart good to feel the love and appreciation coming from even the kids who aren't very affectionate. It's a personal element that I feel like many people tend to overlook or discredit; everyone sees time as money, and that's their loss. So many people are stuck in shitty jobs where they shuffle papers for greedy assholes or something equally vile and inane, but it suits them because so many people are only cut out for shitty jobs. I say keep them there; the less they impact other people the less damage they can do. That point aside; this past year has been extremely busy, and I will admit also very stressful, but has been one of the best of my life because of all the little ones I get to work with. And all the stress and all the work and everything has only convinced me that I have chosen the right career.
Oh what else have I been up to? Pissing away money on things I don't need, reading books, playing video games where I get the chance, studying for classes, etc. None of it matters as much to me as preparing myself for my monsters. I think I will end this post here rather than rambling on for another few hours about nothing important.