OT: For love or for money?

I want to write about at least two things but stuff keeps colliding in my brain and no amount of caffeine is going to make me concentrate on what I want to or filter out this stuff so I’ll just spew.

About the last ten days or so I’d come to the very firm conclusion that my middle-term goal should involve moving out of post-secondary classrooms. It’s not that anything bad has happened in particular (or anything worse than usual) — it’s just become clear to me that in my current setting and in many of the settings in which I am likely to find employment, structural and cultural factors prevent me from teaching effectively by ensuring that grading is going to provide my only opportunity to teach. It’s a longer duration struggle that was already hard in a setting where students cared about their grades but in one where they don’t, like the one I’m in now, I don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve tried to embrace this and accommodate it but it goes against my grain. Most of this generation of students in this setting has been tested out of its eagerness to learn, and I don’t have the energy to either restart their brains, or to grade with the rapidity that they would need to learn anything meaningful from me. I’ve solved my grading psychosis problem — but only in a way that makes it easier for me, not in a way that improves pedagogy for students. I am not instructing anyone; I am only participating in their credentialing — and that doesn’t appeal to me, especially in a setting where they have to borrow and borrow and borrow money to get a credential that may not be of that much use to them anyway in the current economy. I’d been thinking for a long time anyway that I needed to teach in a setting where the students had some motivation to learn that was unrelated to grades or grading — and there are plenty of things like that — skills that people want to acquire that I have and could teach if I needed to.

Thinking all this made work bearable yesterday. Informal indications are that I’m as good a lecturer as I ever was, or better, but I struggle with the whole problem of meaning. Can you tune yourself out during your own lecture? That’s what I feel like I am at risk of lately. That moment where you catch a little bit of what you’re saying and think, “I am tedious and boring.”

So the current provisional plan was to move as close to Wisconsin as I can, perhaps via a teaching job of some kind, with the goal of establishing residence in a state for the purposes of in-state tuition and then getting an M.A. in speech pathology or ESL instruction — matters that would allow me to teach people who were looking for something specific from me and thus would bring their 50 percent of the interaction. Where success would be measured by something other than a number I wrote. It would be absorbing work; it would only last eight hours a day; I’d be free the rest of the time, or at least as free as someone like me can really be, to pursue my own thoughts.

And then last night a friend who’s been unfailing kind to me over the years let me know that he’d nominated me for an academic position that he thought might really speak to my talents and preparation. And about a half hour later a personal invitation to apply for the position came from the chair of the search committee. It would involve teaching people who would be extremely motivated. It’s a campus I’ve been on a few times for other reasons, in a city I’m very slightly familiar with, so I had a concrete picture in my mind and I let my imagination play through how it might be there. I let myself think about what it would be like to do that job. I let myself imagine I’d be successful at it.

And now I’m actually thinking about applying. Letting all the professional stuff I’d edited out of my thoughts creep back in. Remembering that I didn’t want to apply for this job, either, but I made myself and it has turned out to be a kind of temporary salvation.

Didion says, why not have the option? Pesky says, no matter how you feel about the job itself, it could be a crowbar to change your situation here.

I heard the very very ambivalent song above last night for the first time. John Darnielle says: some things you do for money, some things you do for fun, but the things you do for love will come back one by one. And then he talks about murder, suicide and 1 Cor 13.

FFS. What is my problem?

~ by Servetus on October 23, 2012.