Big Move
This is it: I’ll be a resident of the great city of Chicago by the end of August, hopefully sooner. I’ll be teaching 9th grade English at X High School on the South Side of Chicago. (It's practically in Indiana, it’s so far south).
Although I haven’t signed any kind of contract yet, which means, I suppose, that some freak paperwork accident could still mean I won’t have a job come September, that I have been offered a job and accepted that job is all but a done deal. I was reluctant to make a broad general announcement before now, since, my luck being what it is, I didn’t want to tell everyone I had a job and was moving and then have the job disappear on me. However, now that I have had several short phone conversations with folks at X, and I’ve actually started looking on line for available apartments in various North Side neighborhoods, the fact that I have a job and I am going to move to Chicago has finally started to sink in—and I’m pretty darn excited about it all.
No, I am not one of those crusader teachers who has dreamed of working in the inner city since I had one of those social-consciousness epiphanies while doing volunteer work during my second year of graduate school. To be honest, I never really wanted to teach in high school, period. I hated high school when I was there, a long, cliché-filled story that might one day find its way into print, but not today. I cannot stress in this short space how much high school filled me with dread and loathing. I hated it when I was a teen: why would I ever want to go back once I had won my diploma and my freedom? Short answer: I didn’t. No way in hell was I going back. I would sooner have plucked out my spleen with an oyster fork, cooked it in garlic and onions, and eaten it with a nice chianti.
And now I find myself, not only preparing to teach high school, but to do it on the South Side of Chicago. What the hell happened?
Short version: I got my master’s in English, I got married, I got divorced, I got laid off. Somewhere in there I started teaching English as a graduate assistant at Central Michigan University. I liked it. I imagined getting my Ph.D. in English and becoming the hippest young lit professor at some high-powered, big-named university. But when I finished my three years of grad school, I was tired, and I was worried: I kept hearing that two-thirds of all Ph.D. recipients last year were not working in their chosen fields. I didn’t want to spend all that time in school and not get a job. So I got married, moved to Lansing, Michigan, and worked as a telephone service representative for what was then Michigan National Bank. I really put that MA in English to good use, let me tell you.
Trish, the now ex-wife, was the reason for the move to Lansing. She had just finished her teaching certificate and had gotten a job teaching earth science in East Lansing. We moved. I worked. The marriage fell apart (another long story that will not be expanded upon here). But during that time, I had been able to teach night classes at a local business college, and had been able to meet some of Trish’s students by helping out with the school plays (Trish had stage-managed many plays in college, and I had helped construct sets for a few, as well). I discovered that teenagers weren’t as bad as I remembered them being. Some of them were actually kind of cool. And Trish was sick of my relative lack of vacation time, at least compared to the days she got off as a high school teacher. In summer, she wanted to travel, and I was stuck answering phones for the bank. Our solution: I would get my teaching certificate, so we could have the same schedule.
I took the Michigan Test for Teacher Certification in 2000. I started the paperwork to begin teacher ed classes at Michigan State University. Then we got the divorce. And the bank laid me off. Although my life was a trite shambles for about a year, I kept to the plan of getting my teaching credentials. I needed a steady job. Teaching at the community-college level was fun and engaging and rewarding, but the pay sucked. I could make more as a high school teacher. And get benefits! I was purely mercenary in my approach.
So I spent two years in the teacher ed program at MSU, and did pretty well, considering I managed to demonstrate a prodigious amount of tactlessness and insensitivity on my very first day of classes (another long story that will have to wait). My instructor has since written papers about my comments that day. The “axe” event is now immortal.
Poor social graces aside, however, the two years of classes, during which I also spent a year interning at a local high school, did something to me. I lost my hubris (what did I need teacher ed for, anyway? I had been teaching for five years already) and realized that, whatever else I did in life, I wanted to teach. I wanted to get that visceral thrill that anyone who has ever taught gets when you show someone how to do something, and then, after a little help, they can do it on their own. This is, perhaps, a gross oversimplification of the complex dance that occurs between a teacher and a learner, but the thrill is real. And I wanted to feel it, every day, if possible.
So I graduated, went to job fairs, searched the Web for a job—and discovered that Michigan has an overabundance of teachers. My sister, Anne, lives in Aurora with her husband and two young sons, so Chicago was always my backup plan. Now it is my only plan. And despite my worries about how on earth I am ever going to relate to a classroom filled with students who have had life experiences so very different from mine, I find myself getting more and more excited about the change in my life, and the challenges it will bring. At the very least, it will give me plenty of stuff to write about, and I’m going to write about it here.
Chicago isn’t nearly as exotic as Nepal (actually, I suppose that all depends on the perspective of the viewer), where my friend Nate is finishing up his two-year stint in the Peace Corps, but I’m going to follow his lead and record my experiences as a new teacher in an inner-city school on this webpage. I should also mention that my brother-in-law’s blogging efforts have also inspired me in this enterprise. This is likely to be the biggest adventure of my life so far, and I want to share it with anyone who is curious (like the friends who joke that, on the South Side, I’ll finally get to put my years of martial arts training to the test), anyone who is worried (like my parents, who, I’m sure, are worried about me getting shot), and anyone looking for the next great book about how teaching changed my life (interested publishers can contact me at the email address listed on my resume, which you can find here).
Thanks for reading.
P.S. To check out the bloggers who inspired me, go to Nate’s Nepal Page and/or Thilk's Random Thoughts.
Although I haven’t signed any kind of contract yet, which means, I suppose, that some freak paperwork accident could still mean I won’t have a job come September, that I have been offered a job and accepted that job is all but a done deal. I was reluctant to make a broad general announcement before now, since, my luck being what it is, I didn’t want to tell everyone I had a job and was moving and then have the job disappear on me. However, now that I have had several short phone conversations with folks at X, and I’ve actually started looking on line for available apartments in various North Side neighborhoods, the fact that I have a job and I am going to move to Chicago has finally started to sink in—and I’m pretty darn excited about it all.
No, I am not one of those crusader teachers who has dreamed of working in the inner city since I had one of those social-consciousness epiphanies while doing volunteer work during my second year of graduate school. To be honest, I never really wanted to teach in high school, period. I hated high school when I was there, a long, cliché-filled story that might one day find its way into print, but not today. I cannot stress in this short space how much high school filled me with dread and loathing. I hated it when I was a teen: why would I ever want to go back once I had won my diploma and my freedom? Short answer: I didn’t. No way in hell was I going back. I would sooner have plucked out my spleen with an oyster fork, cooked it in garlic and onions, and eaten it with a nice chianti.
And now I find myself, not only preparing to teach high school, but to do it on the South Side of Chicago. What the hell happened?
Short version: I got my master’s in English, I got married, I got divorced, I got laid off. Somewhere in there I started teaching English as a graduate assistant at Central Michigan University. I liked it. I imagined getting my Ph.D. in English and becoming the hippest young lit professor at some high-powered, big-named university. But when I finished my three years of grad school, I was tired, and I was worried: I kept hearing that two-thirds of all Ph.D. recipients last year were not working in their chosen fields. I didn’t want to spend all that time in school and not get a job. So I got married, moved to Lansing, Michigan, and worked as a telephone service representative for what was then Michigan National Bank. I really put that MA in English to good use, let me tell you.
Trish, the now ex-wife, was the reason for the move to Lansing. She had just finished her teaching certificate and had gotten a job teaching earth science in East Lansing. We moved. I worked. The marriage fell apart (another long story that will not be expanded upon here). But during that time, I had been able to teach night classes at a local business college, and had been able to meet some of Trish’s students by helping out with the school plays (Trish had stage-managed many plays in college, and I had helped construct sets for a few, as well). I discovered that teenagers weren’t as bad as I remembered them being. Some of them were actually kind of cool. And Trish was sick of my relative lack of vacation time, at least compared to the days she got off as a high school teacher. In summer, she wanted to travel, and I was stuck answering phones for the bank. Our solution: I would get my teaching certificate, so we could have the same schedule.
I took the Michigan Test for Teacher Certification in 2000. I started the paperwork to begin teacher ed classes at Michigan State University. Then we got the divorce. And the bank laid me off. Although my life was a trite shambles for about a year, I kept to the plan of getting my teaching credentials. I needed a steady job. Teaching at the community-college level was fun and engaging and rewarding, but the pay sucked. I could make more as a high school teacher. And get benefits! I was purely mercenary in my approach.
So I spent two years in the teacher ed program at MSU, and did pretty well, considering I managed to demonstrate a prodigious amount of tactlessness and insensitivity on my very first day of classes (another long story that will have to wait). My instructor has since written papers about my comments that day. The “axe” event is now immortal.
Poor social graces aside, however, the two years of classes, during which I also spent a year interning at a local high school, did something to me. I lost my hubris (what did I need teacher ed for, anyway? I had been teaching for five years already) and realized that, whatever else I did in life, I wanted to teach. I wanted to get that visceral thrill that anyone who has ever taught gets when you show someone how to do something, and then, after a little help, they can do it on their own. This is, perhaps, a gross oversimplification of the complex dance that occurs between a teacher and a learner, but the thrill is real. And I wanted to feel it, every day, if possible.
So I graduated, went to job fairs, searched the Web for a job—and discovered that Michigan has an overabundance of teachers. My sister, Anne, lives in Aurora with her husband and two young sons, so Chicago was always my backup plan. Now it is my only plan. And despite my worries about how on earth I am ever going to relate to a classroom filled with students who have had life experiences so very different from mine, I find myself getting more and more excited about the change in my life, and the challenges it will bring. At the very least, it will give me plenty of stuff to write about, and I’m going to write about it here.
Chicago isn’t nearly as exotic as Nepal (actually, I suppose that all depends on the perspective of the viewer), where my friend Nate is finishing up his two-year stint in the Peace Corps, but I’m going to follow his lead and record my experiences as a new teacher in an inner-city school on this webpage. I should also mention that my brother-in-law’s blogging efforts have also inspired me in this enterprise. This is likely to be the biggest adventure of my life so far, and I want to share it with anyone who is curious (like the friends who joke that, on the South Side, I’ll finally get to put my years of martial arts training to the test), anyone who is worried (like my parents, who, I’m sure, are worried about me getting shot), and anyone looking for the next great book about how teaching changed my life (interested publishers can contact me at the email address listed on my resume, which you can find here).
Thanks for reading.
P.S. To check out the bloggers who inspired me, go to Nate’s Nepal Page and/or Thilk's Random Thoughts.
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