Here’s what I do in my new role as teacher. I read the chapters of Great Expectations we’ll be covering, marking all difficult vocab that will probably need to be defined and difficult passages that will need to summarized as a class. Plan class on introducing Charles Dickens and Great Expectations. Find fun youtube clip on the life of Charles Dickens. Make adjustments to the supply and demand game that didn’t go well in class the day before. Make new material for tweaked supply and demand game. Correct and grade 15 essays on a personal response Aesop fables. Teach class for 3 hours.
That was this past Wednesday.
I realized two things after logging in to write a new post: 1) People link to my blog from pretty bizarre search terms and 2) I only wrote two posts for the entire month of April. Last November, I cranked out more than two posts a week. Still not anything close to the commitment of blogging all-stars, but it was still a big chunk of content for one month. Now, I have a job and a condition called pregnancy which robs me of the energy to do anything productive past 9pm. Unless your definition of productive is eating Belgian chocolate ice-cream and streaming the previous night’s Daily Show, in which case, I make my greatest contributions to society after 9pm.
Clearly, I’m going to have make a conscious commitment to maintaining Coconut Water. I don’t want it sitting out languishing in the Brazilian sun developing a film of bacteria and mosquito eggs. (Can mosquitoes lay eggs on coconut water? Probably, they’re basically invincible.) The end result of this pregnancy is a baby, which I’m told, will devour whatever remaining free time I have and possibly my will to shower and tolerate other human beings. The chances I’ll be getting back up to two posts a week are small.
Or maybe not. I will be on maternity leave for four months, and while breast feeding is supposed to beautiful, I haven’t heard anyone call it intellectually stimulating. I might desperately cranking out posts. In the long term though, next school year should be easier. I won’t be new to the material and spending hours planning every class. I’ll already have my youtube clip of Fozzy Bear reciting Robert Frost.
The really amazing about my daily schedule right now is that I only teach part-time. I’m in front of a class teaching 16 hours yet find myself working all day, every day. I think what I really need is one of those cushy full-time teaching jobs those pundits keep talking.
