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april 9, 2001.I have the feeling that I've forgotten Poet's birthday. Drag.
"I want to do everything and be everywhere there is to be, but at the same time I'm afraid of doing anything away from home," I said. Josie nodded in emphatic agreement. That's the problem with having such a useful trade, I thought later. You can go anywhere and do anything and the amount of choice starts to terrify you.
I am one baby step closer to being a teacher this evening, for this afternoon I endured my second and last formal assessment of the year. I'm starting to become terribly cross in the aftermath of these sessions; during the well-meaning advice I maintain sharp eye contact and let my mind wander to far-away places. Today I corrected my Sin of Sorta-Sarcasm in teaching, but there were still picayune critical details. I was told that I might just be playing above the intellectual capacities of these children. Well, I'm sorry, but if I dumb this stuff down any farther, I might as well just give them all A's and sit in an empty classroom sipping gin & tonics. I don't feel as if I'm challenging this class very much at all. This is a book for adult readers. This is a course for senior adolescents. Somewhere in there I should be allowed to use the Faust legend in a simple way without fearing that I need to dumb it down a tad. Thus ends the rant. Well, I told you that days like these make me terribly cross. I'm also cross because the wheeze in my lungs is back. At various points in the day I would get short of breath, and have to stand perfectly still while air struggled in & out of my chest. Luckily, during my supervised lesson I was able to call upon vocal reserves of which I was previously unaware. Despite my almost complete lack of energy and what might be called gumption, I managed to get & keep their attention throughout my 'sophistimacated' lecture, which I regard as a minor miracle. "Life itself is too great a miracle for us to make so much fuss about potty little reversals of what we pompously assume to be the natural order." The greatest part of the day was, of course, its end. As we waited for Josie to show up from a staff meeting, Petra & I draped ourselves tiredly across the staff room sofas. "I want chips," I whined. "Me too," she whined back. Soon it developed from a want to a need. We did not just deserve chips, our lives might very well depend on their consumption. When we finally bought our chips (small bag of ketchup for her, large bag of plain ruffled for me), our constant snacking made the rainy, cruddy drive home bearable. "Look at this! She's half my size, but her bag's twice as big!" |
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