6/22/09

I’m in this now. I’d be insane denying fear of the future I’ve launched. I’m in evening summer school classes with a group of thoughtful, attentive, smart people. My fear is that I’m in over my head, my classmates somehow already look like teachers. I’m one of two in the entire class that has no, or very little, teaching experience. I’ve begun quizzing classmates on how they secured teaching gigs without credentials. But my point isn’t how they got the gig it’s more of an opening to find why, after teaching a little why do you want to make it permanent. They all seem to be old hands at navigating classrooms from the helm whereas my main position for over two decades has been at the oar’s.
Ahaaaa fear and feelings of inadequacy are with me always and a comfort in days of despair – with them I’m never truly alone. So it was last night as I rode my bike home from school.
The last forty-five minutes of class we watched a video on the lack of funding due to Proposition 13 with as its consequences the horrible, dare I say sinful, disrepair of the California public school system. Other than a brief portion of the tape that had accidently been recorded over showing elk swimming across a river, the video held no good news. I looked at a classmate, Math and Sciences, and asked, “So, what are we doing?” He replied with shock, “I don’t know.”
I know what all of us are thinking, at least I think I know. I know what I’m thinking, I won’t end up in a poor school without parental involvement. I won’t be reduced to baby sitter in a space without classrooms or chairs or even books. The hope is that by the time our class of hopefuls get our credentials and into the classroom we’ll all be saved by Uncle Barak. Somehow. We have to have hope. We have to. We prospective teachers have to hope against hope that some sanity will come to Sacramento in a form yet undiscovered in California politics. We hope. We have to have the blind faith and luck that sustains survivors ranging from layoffs to Auschwitz. Some of my classmates might want the challenge, they might be itching for the fight but I imagine that the Quixotic among us as with the population at large are few. We idealists have signed on for a crazy-making job that even in the most halcyon of settings is rife with challenge. My classmates and I are buying into a system that from what we saw on the screen is almost beyond resuscitation. We’re like those wrinkled brown desert people in the casino of Searchlight, Nevada, dully plunking rent money in the slot hoping for the payoff. Not the big payoff, the million dollar, end of work payoff but the, I’ll be able to pay the rent and have a little left over payoff. And maybe the other kind of payoff, the thing that makes you feel good about yourself and the world in which you live. One of the things that I’ve seen from my teacher friends that have stayed in the profession is that they seem content. They are tired but at peace with themselves. A teachers peace, I have to believe, is the result of right thought and right actions, they know, although few say this often, that they are helping the human condition if only a little.
So my fear is the same as yesterday, and the day before and the day before that, it’s a fear of the thing that hasn’t happened yet; my automatic default position trips to this, “My future is going to be hell.” But, maybe right thoughts might follow right actions and with the action taken, with the credential process in motion, maybe just maybe my fear could be nothing but smoke.