and a longer thought for the day...

I've decided to record something here, but it's not what i had intended. Not originally, anyway.

I tried writing a blog. It failed.

I was a fool, and it was a foolish escapade. Not the kind of foolish escapade with spinning rims and televisions mounted in the steering wheel, but the kind that occupies your actual time and effort instead of your garage. Still, both stroke the ego, both parallel the self-definition as trite examples of one’s fallible decision-making.

As a teacher, I see fools daily. They are just as much the parents, students, teachers, and politicians that I work with as they are the reflections of myself I catch in a hundred mirrors and mirrored eyes.

I wanted to write a political blog, but realized that there are enough mild moderates like me to not care about my point of view as there were frothing conservatives there were to passionately attack my betters.

I wanted to write a blog about teaching, but that was a bust because nobody cares about teachers until they have a budget to cut. Wisconsin is as foolish as I am, perhaps more. Education is by definition a fickle and risky pursuit, the first to receive blame and the last to earn praise, though for most individuals a serious and influential part of their childhood. I’m used to that. As I said, I’m a fool. But after that, I decided I was a fool worth reading to those other fools in my same place.

I started writing every week. It died, not because I ran out of time or memory or topics, but because of burnout. My wife got sick. And the tutoring job I took over the summer turned into a full-blown portfolio project in order to get a student his diploma despite the best efforts of the state test to keep him from graduating. And my classes got harder – a lot harder – to deal with. AP, state test workshop/remediation, a terrible creative writing class filled with students who had no desire to write, a severely special needs student who was unable to speak without the aid of a headpointer and Vanguard II language processor, a student who had only been speaking English for a couple years, NHS advisorship for a failing chapter, and so on. It makes for a hard year, moreso when all of this is new and all of the new-ness hits at once.

The real reason, though, was a workshop I attended. Workshops have a tendency to be tedious, but this was actually terrible. It was a plan based on decades-old research that most of us were already using better versions of. When you spend fifteen minutes listening to someone painstakingly describe the difference between Bloom’s Taxonomy and Bloom’s Taxonomy revised (hint: switch the last two levels, change the verb form; I just did a better job than she did, and in far less time) you know you’re not exactly in a quality program. I tried to write about it, I tried to churn through it. And it didn’t work. It was terrible, but it was so lovecraft-ly terrible that it burned out my ability to accurately describe its terribleness.

So it fried my brain, and I still had to take care of a sick wife, and I still had to teach, and I still had to keep going with everything else I had to do. I had a bit of a reprieve with progress in a hobby of mine, but this only added to the time i wasn't getting other work done, which caught up to me quickly. It took me the entirety of the summer to get back in mindspace enough to face school. I worked in the laundry room of a hotel with possibly the socially-dumbest guy I’ve ever met in my life, and had a good time not being burned out.

Now, I’m a glutton for punishment. I want nothing to do with that mindspace again. But I kept AP, NHS, and the title of “that guy who does portfolios that pass” and this year hasn’t been all wine and truffles. But not being new, all those pressures have been effectively less even if they really haven't lessened. Plus, i was volunteered for a visiting accreditation team, and the chairmanship of a committee for our own school's accreditation process. And my car died.

I'm not special, it's not that my pressures are greater than someone else's but that they are mine to deal with and mine to shoulder that makes them seem worse.

It’s all too easy to worry about things, and here – where none of my family or coworkers or probably anyone else in the blogosphere will see this, I can be a little more frank about all the worries of a personal nature, as well as the bigger picture worries that would terrify the average person – also lovecraftian, also awarded within our own minds the titles of “that which must not be named” and described as sanity-eating. We all have them, they’re part of the modern experience.

When I was a kid, I was terrified of nuclear war, which later I can detail for you in perfect clarity. That experience has shaped me as a person, partially because I know what it’s like to feel powerless in the dark while dark dreams and portents of future doom roost on the eaves of the headboard. We all feel anxieties, we are all deep down terrified we’ll pull a Loman and dead-end in madness or uselessness or loss. The reason why people tend to think “it’ll never happen to me,” I think, is because we already HAVE imagined far worse happening to us, and none of THAT actually happened, so we must be safe!

We’re all safe, I suppose, until we aren’t. The measure of the foolish seems to be to draw that line where it doesn’t apply, or sometimes to draw that line at all.