I have two jobs. I haven’t had two jobs since I babysat and mowed lawns as a teenager. I’m not actually working any more than I was, but I’m trying to arrange my new schedule and trying to work within two systems. Thankfully, the people I work for are pretty nice about it all.
My goal with my old job is to let it fall gracefully. He’s closing the business. It was ironic or intuitive that I gave notice a week before he intended to make the announcement. Now, I’m the architect of the demolition. Take out what’s valuable and bring it down without losing too much money for my boss in that last month. Keep things safe for the people.
My goal with my new job is to establish myself. Okay, I’ll be honest. I want them to get to know the me that I present while I get them used to the me that is a little quirky.
For example, I think I just blew it when i wrote two emails in response to an email from a parent asking if we could cover some material I’d planned to cover later. The first email was enough, but since I woke up after only five and a half hours of sleep and my early-morning mind got hold of that, it began to go over everything I’d planned, in the past week, to cover with this woman’s boys and ultimately my other students. Did I tell you that I have a weird and temporary form of anxiety that only strikes when I haven’t slept?
I do.
Yes, and I’ve been doing lesson plans since I don’t have a curriculum on hand. It’s not that I’d been lazy before. I hadn’t. I just hadn’t written it all down. I just hadn’t worried about these particular boys or their mother. I just wanted to cover the material for all my language arts kids.
See, I thought the curriculum from my old job was boring and outdated. It still talked about record stores and ‘new CDs.’ It had so much implicit bias that it was embarrassing. My students might have been to Dubai, Europe, and NYC, but they’d never been to a farm. They might never have played with a top.
So, in my insomniac state this morning I began to organize the list of games and exercises I want to do with my students, like a writer’s workshop on steroids. Imagine material that I couldn’t convey in twenty weeks.
So, I finished this list and got up from the computer, starving, and toasted an English muffin. I could feel the heat rising from the toaster. I was cold. I could smell the bread and the jelly that I’d uncapped. I hadn’t bothered to eat yet.
When I got it buttered with a dab of jelly on each side, and took one delicious bit, I realized that I’d just created an outline for my next book. I would call it Playing with Words: Comprehensive Games for Young Readers and Writers.
I’d always told my old boss that I wasn’t going to write a book about tutoring even though he said I should. It just didn’t feel right, writing about the boy who had an accident and tried to hide it despite the smell. It definitely felt wrong to write about the boy who was finally given the diagnosis of extreme discalcula after two agonizing years and frustration out the ears of math tutoring for him. And I had no authority to write a book about the technicalities. There were professors and doctors to do that.
I just wanted to make the work fun and thorough.
So, I guess I am writing a book. I finished writing the outline. All I have to do is fill in the gaps with the specific games I play with my students to do what the teachers do in all seriousness. I do all this until the education system catches up with all the books I’ve read about pedagogy.
After I finished my toast, I trundled back to my bed. I really need all eight hours if I’m going to be patient with kids.
And then, I dreamed.
I dreamed that I went to my old job and needed a book from my car. When I went outside, I exited an entirely different business. After I found the book, I had to walk a gauntlet of grumbling parents and the pieces of paper in my pocket that I’d thought were my new business cards were scraps of paper with random numbers on them. When I sat back down, my student was gone and a new student sat in his place. I tried to recognize this kid, to remember her name, but couldn’t. I looked around the room and didn’t know who any of them were. I dreamed I fell asleep. I dreamed that my boss and none of the other tutors showed up and I tried to wrangle twelve kids of different ages into accomplishing something without any individual tutoring from me. I dreamed I was so tired I couldn’t keep my eyes open or speak clearly.
That’s the new job/old job dream. That’s the metaphor for losing everything and not knowing what I’m supposed to do.
But when I woke up, I realized that I had a decent schedule. I had some of my old students and some new ones. I realized that I had a shiny new curriculum that I could turn into a book even though I have no specific authority to do write a book about education.
That’s how I roll. I didn’t have authority to write my last two books either.
Thank you for listening, jules