Academic Bingeing
Denali, my cat, is crying a fat meow over my neglect. Several months worth of magazines are piling over the coffee table- cardboard “subscription renewal” inserts have all gently snowed down towards the carpet. I haven’t flipped my calendar over to February. Sure, one month may not sound all that bad, but reconsider it has only been nailed to the wall since the New Year. My three email accounts are overflowing with unanswered emails. Discounting grad school reflection papers, I haven’t composed an original blog post in weeks. Can’t even remember the last time that I ran consistently. I haven’t scheduled a band practice in at least two weeks. The edge of the Mountain Dew rush is wearing off. I am coming down off of an academic binge.
Once again I have managed to allow work and school to overtake my life. Consider this: my positions on more committees that I have fingers. Tack onto that my role as Language Arts Facilitator for the middle school; never mind that track and field season is only five weeks away. Being a middle school language arts teacher means that I have 100-some projects sitting at school, waiting to be graded. In the past four weeks, I will have presented sessions at three separate workshops: Parent Academy, Student Academy, and Conference for Writing and Technology (which doesn’t even count helping out at the National Writing Project’s Midwinter Writing Conference). Additionally I am also taking two graduate courses at Rutgers University. Just last week I had to wade through 400 pages of graduate level texts for class.
“Mashuginah!” I tell you. “Mashuginah!”
Who would have guessed that I stay up late on a weekend night to get more work accomplished, or that I rush home from teaching to dive into my graduate work and begin learning? Sometimes I feel there aren’t enough hours in my week to get it all done and seriously begin to panic. My largest regret is that in the profession of education, hard work is not matched with greater financial earnings. Hell, I am taking out a 5k loan for two courses, after which I will still need three more courses to horizontally jump to the next step on the salary guide- earning a pittance of $900 more per year before Uncle Sam decides to take out his share. At least I make enough to keep a steady supply of Mountain Dew coursing through my bloodstream.
Once again I have managed to allow work and school to overtake my life. Consider this: my positions on more committees that I have fingers. Tack onto that my role as Language Arts Facilitator for the middle school; never mind that track and field season is only five weeks away. Being a middle school language arts teacher means that I have 100-some projects sitting at school, waiting to be graded. In the past four weeks, I will have presented sessions at three separate workshops: Parent Academy, Student Academy, and Conference for Writing and Technology (which doesn’t even count helping out at the National Writing Project’s Midwinter Writing Conference). Additionally I am also taking two graduate courses at Rutgers University. Just last week I had to wade through 400 pages of graduate level texts for class.
“Mashuginah!” I tell you. “Mashuginah!”
Who would have guessed that I stay up late on a weekend night to get more work accomplished, or that I rush home from teaching to dive into my graduate work and begin learning? Sometimes I feel there aren’t enough hours in my week to get it all done and seriously begin to panic. My largest regret is that in the profession of education, hard work is not matched with greater financial earnings. Hell, I am taking out a 5k loan for two courses, after which I will still need three more courses to horizontally jump to the next step on the salary guide- earning a pittance of $900 more per year before Uncle Sam decides to take out his share. At least I make enough to keep a steady supply of Mountain Dew coursing through my bloodstream.
Tags:
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home