I was just reading some of my old posts, and Jesus H. Christ on a stick, I have a problem.  I used to be kind of funny, and then at some point I just sank into the fucking mire of self-pity and angst.  Oops.
   
     I don't know what happened, really.  I guess my life just started to suck a little bit more, and then I started writing less and complaining more when I DID write.  It's kind of the like the diary thing - people usually only write extensively in a diary when things turn to shit.  When everything is good, they're too busy living life to sit down and write about all the happy thoughts.  So ... sorry about that.   (I think.)

     I wonder what I would have been like if I'd been born without this existential angst hovering like a cartoon cloud above my head.  Or maybe it's just all the alcohol and narcotics lingering in my spinal column.  I'll never know!!

     So to the single person (probably not even a single person at this point, because I've alienated every single demographic I can think of), um, sorry?   I suck.

     Love, Holden

Teaching & Unpaid Bills

                I am a teacher and no one cares.  If I do my job really well, no one complains.  If I do a shitty job, people complain.  Either way, I don’t lose my job, and I don’t get paid any more money.  As long as I don’t rape a student, get altered with students, or flagrantly cheat, I’m not going to get fired.  Conversely, even if I raise the average ACT score of my students five points, spend six hours a night grading papers, and provide in-depth counseling for the troubled, teenage souls in my building, I will not get one cent more in my paycheck than the fucking slacker who turns a movie on every day and hands their students answers to the summative assessments for their subject area. 

                Tell me again why I try so hard.  Tell me again why I read every book I teach for every class again every year.  Tell me again why I get grief for not being more present in the hallways and at school functions, because I teach in a discipline which sucks up all my free time. 

                I can’t even pay my bills.  I put my phone bill on a credit card this month, because I can’t afford to pay all my bills.  I have a job that I’ve worked my ass off at for 10 years, but I can’t get ahead, because my chosen profession is as a teacher.  If I wanted to semi-lobotomize myself and get a degree in administration where I do a whole lot of nothing other than coming up with BIG IDEAS for other people to implement, then I get paid some more.  But if I want to do the thing that (I think) I’m pretty good at, I have to be satisfied with being marginally poor for the rest of my life.  Awesome. 

                If you want to be a teacher, marry rich.  Or don’t have children.  And certainly don’t have any expectations that your life will be fabulous in any material sort of way.  All good has to be taken from the experience.  To be honest, that experience is worth it most of the time.  But it would be really great to be paid according to the outcome of what I do. 

                I guess the thing that really pissed me off about this was that I went grocery shopping yesterday, something which makes me incredibly angry, because it’s so god damn expensive.  But yesterday I went shopping at a shitty No Frills in Bellevue.  Totally run-down, crappy place.  And the food was more expensive!!  Someone tried to tell me it’s because they have to accommodate for the theft which occurs in poorer places, but I say, “bullshit!”  Rich, suburban people steal just as much as poor people!  And they are probably more blatant with their theft.  I will admit right now that I went to Walmart to buy mulch (in a wealthy suburb), and I loaded the mulch I bought into my car along with three bags of soil I didn’t buy.  I stole it.  Why?  I have no idea, other than that I didn’t have enough money and the opportunity was there. 

                The point is not that I’m a thief and a criminal, but that I have to ration the things I buy, because I can’t afford anything.  I’m going to either have to quit a job I love doing so that I can slowly climb out of crippling debt, or keep teaching and dig a financial hole so deep that my children will inherit nothing but unpaid bills and latent hostility. 

                It’s fucked up.  And because I have degrees in education and English, I can’t do anything to fix it.    

Emphemizing Education

Euphemization is not a word (at least that’s what Microsoft Word is telling me its annoying red underscore).  But if “to euthanize” means to kill something incurably ill, and a “euphemism” is a phrase used in place of a term that might be considered too harsh, then it follows that “to euphemize” to refuse to use direct verbiage about something which a person or institution is in the process of killing in order to deceive others.  So pay attention America, because schools are in the process of euphemizing real education.

I believe what we have is the classic bait and switch.  In the newspapers, we celebrate school districts which meet or exceed preset standardized test scores, and we deride those schools which fail to meet them.  We publish lists and numbers and statistics and rankings, either celebrating ourselves or pointing blame (whichever is more convenient and apropos to our personal circumstances). 

The “new thing” is ACADEMIES.  To put that in perspective, the “old thing” was MAGNET SCHOOLS or CHARTER SCHOOLS.   Yes, I realize that both of those are still around, but the educational march is continually to a new, unspecified drummer in order to keep people confused enough to be fooled by words placed in new contexts.  This renaming of things which were previously just called SCHOOLS is the first step in euphemization. 

To call a school (or a portion thereof) an ACADEMY is to imply a standard of excellence and specificity; for example, a HEALTH ACADEMY indicates students will be well on their way to becoming doctors.  An excellent choice, indeed, for students who want to be in the health profession.  My school offers such a program, after which students are awarded a CNA, allowing them to earn a solid paycheck right out of high school.  This seems like a lovely idea for motivated students who want a more tailored education, as they spend part of each school day at a local hospital. 

But it would be silly to stop there; where there is room for one ACADEMY, there is certainly room for dozens.  We also have an A2B ACADEMY in which students take specific courses taught by teachers with their subject MA, then graduate high school with an Associate’s Degree from a community college.  To sum up this ACADEMY:  students take courses they already would have taken, pay $25 apiece for each one, and jump over the first two years of college.  Not AP courses.  Not Honors courses.  Just some courses selected by the school. 

You see, classification is everything.  Euphemisms reign in education.  People with super-important degrees in EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION or CURRICULUM get paid to create ways for both their schools to look better on paper and for their students to be better marketed to society.  A win-win, yes?  Unless of course we consider the very real fact that college courses should not be the equivalent of high school courses.  If they ARE equal, then what exactly is the point of college?  An expensive delay of reality?  A huge Ponzi scheme to separate one of America’s most financially vulnerable demographics from his or her money?  (or to be more specific, from their parents’ money via bloated government loans)

We have a ZOO ACADEMY and a LEADERSHIP ACADEMY, which may be cool and fun, but they certainly don’t churn out zoologists or leaders.  But they sure do look good on resumes …  and after all, it doesn’t matter what you learn.  This is America – if we can prepackage it and sell it, then we’ve somehow won (even if no one even know what “it” is).