I'm slowly beginning to remember what it felt like to enjoy my life. I know that sounds like a hideously melodramatic statement, but there it is. Tonight we sat around, ate soup and watched a movie. And just lying on the couch for a whole evening - let alone lying around on an evening when I feel ill - without worrying about a project or a lesson plan or work or the filthy mess in the house is a pearl beyond price. I remember when I used to have so much leisure I didn't know what to do with it...but my teens are long over. Now I just teach teens.
Speaking of which, I am still 5 lessons short of a completed unit for my final project. But hey, it's the weekend - I can procrastinate until Sunday afternoon now!
The movie above, by the way, was Rock Star. I loved it - not the greatest movie of all time, but it let me get all of my highschool rock-on ya yas out before an embarrassing backlog built up and exploded all over my carefully-constructed filigree of good taste. Also, the final goof reel, with the prank on Mark Wahlberg, has to be seen to be believed (I was honestly so stunned that I forgot to laugh).
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Two things happened today. The first was an amazing presentation by the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Youth Project about homophobia & heterosexism and all kinds of other things. Talk about your eye-openers: I thought that I was relatively comfortable with homosexuality and I thought I could teach it competently, but they blew me out of the fucking water and I'm grateful for that.
There's this funny thing that happens to you when you start to teach, and this is that you start collecting lesson materials everywhere like a demented magpie. Today there were 2 speakers, a male and a female, and I immediately wished that I could freeze-dry the male and put him in my files (no, that's a compliment, really!) Honestly, he was fabulous: straight-acting, raised in a tiny rural community, funny, garrulous and a Newfoundlander. You just can't top that in a decade of trying.
The second thing was that my group put on a presentation on instant Internet vanity publishing. As the Boy later remarked, I hit the jackpot in terms of cutting-edge English Language Arts topics that I actually knew something about. What I find more amazing is that we didn't have a presentation this morning - we wrote the whole thing in 15 minutes over lunch. Honestly - we were one sober second thought from putting on a presentation about the Simpsons. We could've made a connection with ELA, I swear. I love teaching teachers - they've been stunned goofy from 3 years of lectures in their undergraduate degree and they'll just talk and talk and talk...you hardly have to work at keeping their attention let alone make sure that they learn something.
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2 years ago today: responsibility is totally thankless
