This year has been hard for me. Ok, that's a bit of an understatement. For those of you who I haven't completely alienated because of my lack of posting, to make a long story short, I have been forced to go back to substitute teaching because of lack of jobs and a rather nasty situation that I can't, for professional reasons, post here. If I could, I would rant. A lot. And for those who know me personally (which, honestly are probably the only people who actually read this thing), you already know.
Bookstore cutie and I have had a bit of a rough go of it. We still like each other, that much is fairly certain, but the amount of demands on our time (mostly his, because he's taking a crazy courseload at school) has led to us not really getting to spend much time together, if at all, outside of work. To tell you the truth, I'm a little sad about this, because really.. I'd like to spend all of my time with him and the rest of the world can be damned, but that's not practical or realistic. Darn. I have started to really appreciate when I do get to see him or talk to him though. Like today :) and tomorrow :)
So anyway, on to the main point of this post. My latest identity crisis.
I don't like subbing. Day to day, it's ok: the kids can be good, I occassionally actually get to teach stuff when the teachers realize it's me who will be in for them and not some random who can't control a classroom, and I don't have the planning or marking to do. When the kids aren't good, I get to go home at the end of the day and thank my lucky stars that I don't have to be in that class the next day. But I still don't like it. I don't have a sense of community, I don't get to set the tone of the class or plan what to do or get the respect that I deserve. Essentially, I get to babysit. Awesome. (Not really.)
So for the past few months with all of this going on.. no real job, relationship floundering, struggling to make ends meet.. I have been fairly depressed. I've really tried not to be by really trying to keep my brain active - I've been reading a book or more a week lately (expensive habit, but it could be worse) but things have still progressed to the point where I've begun questioning my life's goals. Do I really even want to teach anymore? Am I a good teacher if they won't let me teach? If I'm not a teacher, who am I? That kind of thing.
I think I'm struggling with this more than most people who find themselves in my situation because I was the type of kid who ALWAYS knew what she wanted to do. You could ask the 3 year old me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I would have told you that I wanted to be a teacher. I had my stuffed animals and occasionally my baby brother lined up and I taught them their ABCs. Today it isn't stuffed animals or the ABCs that I'm teaching, but you get the idea. I never really considered anything else.
The soul searching really started at the end of January, early February when it became clear that I wasn't going to be getting a term job for second semester. I applied at a billion different places (well not really, because if there were a billion jobs to apply for, I would have gotten one), had a few interviews, but was turned down or overlooked for all of them. I honestly don't know what it was that lost me the jobs. It could have been any number of different things: I'm young, I look even younger, I'm female (and don't tell me that doesn't matter to a principal trying to find someone to teach a bunch of kids who think they're all "gangstas", because it does), and I'm far from intimidating. And what's more, is that I don't want to be anything other than who I am. The one thing that I do have that you'd think would be an asset for a teacher, but doesn't actually get you very far, is a brain. I'm an academic, but apparently you don't need to be to teach high school. Actually, it's probably preferable if you aren't - lower expectations means less frustration. And in the classes they let young teachers teach, you only need to be able to intimidate a class into submission and hopefully be able to cram some curriculum down their throats. Oh, was that me being cynical? Sorry. But at least you see where I'm coming from.
Students have been asking me for as long as I have been teaching, "Miss, if you're so smart, why did you become a teacher? Why didn't you become a doctor or something?" My usual response to this is to gesture to the class, "Because I like this... the interaction with people, getting to teach you all the stuff that I know.. I like that." And I do. But it's getting more and more rare for me to be able to do what I love about teaching, at the level that I enjoy.
So I started thinking: if I'm not happy, when was the last time that I was happy? And the answer wasn't the last time that I had a teaching job. The last time I was happy was this summer when I wasn't teaching (and bookstore cutie and I were super close but that was beside the point).
If I'm not allowed to teach (because I can't get a job) and the last time I had a teaching job I wasn't all that happy anyway.. what would I do if I wasn't a high school teacher anymore?
So I thought some more. What makes me happy? Drama. Reading. Shakespeare. Teaching kids who WANT to learn. Learning new things. For about a week I played with the idea of going back to school and taking drama so that I could finally have the qualifications to teach drama, but then I realized that it wouldn't really help me get a job any more than the qualifications I have now. Sure, I would be qualified to teach a drama class, but drama jobs are harder to get than English ones and those are few and far between. Not to mention the fact that doing that would require several years and thousands of dollars in tuition that I couldn't afford. I wish I had known, going into university, that it was possible to do a double major because I would have taken both English and Drama when I had the chance. Oh well.
With all of this in the back of my mind, knowing that I wasn't happy, and getting to the point where I wanted to do something about it, I went over to my parents house on Sunday. My darling brother (and roommate) who had just returned from a trip to the Dominican (expensive) had approached them asking if it was possible for him to move back in for the summer. Without telling me. He's in a bit of debt (not really bad, but enough that he can't pay it off) and he's planning on moving out with his girlfriend in September. My sister, my other roommate, is going to be in Ottawa for the summer and was intending to still pay rent so that we could keep our apartment.
What Mike's request to my parents did was turn my entire world upside down almost immediately. So here I am, faced with having no roommates in a three bedroom apartment that I cannot afford by myself, with no teaching salary to carry me through the summer months. Not to mention the fact that my parents might be moving to Ottawa in the next few months and they've already asked me and my sister to move into the house until they decide to sell it.
My mom's response to this? Sure Mike, you can move back in. Lisa, you should move back in too.
My response? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm 27 years old. I DO NOT want to move back in with my parents. Living at home SUCKS! It is so hard to have privacy, freedom, a life? But what other choice do I have, if I've already agreed to stay in the house while my parents are gone? I can't just get another roommate, not that any of my friends are in need of roommates right now either.
So we agreed on some terms and conditions that don't require me to surrender the freedom that I've become accustomed to and in the process of all of that I broke down and cried. A lot. The source of the tears came from my unwillingness to surrender a lifestyle that I enjoy and that I've worked really hard for, and from not actually being completely happy with my current situaiton. So we talked and I mentioned the idea that I didn't know if I really wanted to teach high school anymore (We've gone over how hard that admission is for someone like me, right? Hense the identity crisis). I mentioned the idea of possibly going back to school and I guess it must have been in the back of my mind for a while, because suddenly I was telling my parents that I wanted to continue on with my original "backup plan" for when I was trying to get into the education program - if they won't let me teach high school, I'll teach university.
In order to do that, I need to do my honours thesis and a couple of other English courses that I avoided doing when I was doing my English degree the first time around. My thinking was, why put yourself through the extra torture of writing a 40-60 page paper if you don't have to? And to think that I want to now... well obviously I must really be unhappy or have gone completely crazy. So I explained my basic plan of going back, doing my honours (1 year) and then going on to do my Masters in English (which I can have funded through grants and stuff) and then do my PhD, and my parents were surprisingly, super excited. Weird. I thought they'd think I was nuts, just like everyone else would. Turns out that they had noticed how unhappy I have been in the last little while and they're glad that I'm finally deciding to do something that will make me happy. My mom told me I was "wasting my time" teaching high school but I think that might have been going a little too far. I'm glad I went the route that I did because without it, I wouldn't have half the friends that I do today.
The last few days have been occupied with me acting on this plan. (Honestly, I don't think my parents really expected me to do anything about this "plan" that I had announced.. but when I'm serious about something, I'm serious.. I'm going to do it!) Monday I procrastinated but I thought about what I was going to say in my email to the English department and how this not-so-sudden sudden decision was going to change my life for the next little while. Somewhere between Monday and Tuesday I decided that I was definitely going to do it, if it was possible. So Tuesday I emailed the department, got a response back right away that was incredibly positive and set up an appointment to meet with the head of the department on Thursday.
Thursday I went to the Mount and sat down with the chair of the department and discussed what I had to do to complete the Honours Certificate in English (I already have my BA, this just adds the honours to it). Apparently, it's pretty easy to get started. All I have to do is fill out a form and give it to the registrar's office to get my student number reactivated, find a professor who is willing to supervise my thesis, and write a letter to the department requesting admission to the honors program. They then sit down, look at my letter, talk to the professor about whether or not they're really willing to help me, and then approve my application, at which point it then gets processed. Then I start researching. I'll have to take 1.5 or possibly 2.5 courses next year plus my honours thesis which is considered another class in itself, and I'll be done by the end of April to graduate in May. The only thing is, it won't be possible for me to substitute teach for more than 1 day a week while I'm in school. That makes the money situation a bit difficult, but if I'm going to have to move home anyway... well.. that's just something that I'll have to think about as soon as everything gets a little more solidified on Tuesday when I go back to the Mount for the info session and to meet my potential thesis supervisor.
I'm excited about this. It's scary, and I'm really nervous because I'm out of practice and I'm sure my research and writing skills are a little bit rusty at best, but I'm excited. It feels like I'm on the edge of something great and that I could possibly be something great. Who knows. But everything happens for a reason, right? Maybe I wasn't meant to get a job this year, because I need to do this.
I've been thinking a lot about friendship recently. The last week has been the start of what I am expecting to be a month concentrated with meetings with my closest friends before I move and attempt to make more friends in a different province. So needless to say, I have been thinking about how I actually became friends with the people I'm closest to. I met my best friend (and current roomie) J when we were 13 - that's almost 16 years ago - so it's hard to even trace how our friendship developed to where we can tell each other everything, but as she enjoys reminding me, I ignored her at first until we bonded over a shared teenage obsession. In junior high it was relatively easy to make friends. For those of us who weren't counted among the "popular" crowd, anyone not among the groups that ignored you for fear of social stigma or actively shoved you into lockers was a potential friend - girls who liked the same band, the same boy, played the same instrument, lived on the same street, were in the same classes - it didn't matter. Now, much later, it seems to be a bit different. Thankfully, life post junior high is much less openly hostile, but it is not quite as easy to make those lasting friendships in the same way. How I met one of my best friends, C seems to be an exception to that - while teaching at the same school, we had a very elementary school moment where I walked into her classroom and said the grown-up version of "We're going to be best friends, okay?" But even that wasn't completely instant.
