It’s like a fun game where the winner gets their spirit beat out of them by the losers.

Guess who got in trouble with her mentor teacher AGAIN for not giving the mentor teacher hard copies of the lesson plans for the day?

Guess who stayed at high school until after 7:00 last night to participate in parent-teacher conferences, only to have her mentor teacher never introduce her to the parents coming to conference?

Guess who went over with her mentor teacher, in ridiculously specific detail, the lesson plans for today during the downtime between conferences she wasn’t apart of?

Guess who’s mentor teacher changed the whole order of the plans she had made for today, because it isn’t how the mentor teacher would do it, which was duly recorded  in the notes being taken to plan the lesson and repeated back to the mentor teacher at least ten times before everyone left for the evening?

Guess who, when her mentor teacher gets back from running to the post office during her planning block, is probably going to get bitched at until she feels like she’s been run over by a truck because she’s not doing stuff the exact way the mentor teacher would do it?

I don’t get it, and maybe I’m so wrong I can’t tell, but I really don’t understand why, if we plan together and I’m obviously writing down everything that I’m being told, and I don’t deviate from the plan for fear of getting ripped a new one after the lesson, that it’s a huge deal if I don’t give her a hard copy packet of the stuff I’m doing that day. If she wanted things two days in advance, fine. But we don’t plan two days in advance, making that impossible, since the packing guide she gave me is sort of impossible to follow, time wise. We plan the day before. She doesn’t get to school early enough in the morning (I beat her here every day) to go over and adjust a lesson plan. I make all my copies of hand-outs and what not I’m using the day before, and I show them to her (well, usually their hers or came out of the book, so there isn’t much to show). Maybe I’m just lazy, but I don’t really understand what good printing her copies of this nonsense does (besides waste trees) if I’m not deviating from the plan that we set up, together, that she has already found fault with and corrected at least twice. Okay, here, I’ll make a concession. If I didn’t have pop quiz time every day where she goes, “What are you doing tomorrow?” and I tell her everything and she asks me dumb questions like, “And how are you going to do that?” or “And what do you want them to get out of that?” (the last one is especially dumb since she told me to plan all my lessons around the material they need to know for the selection test that goes with each piece of literature in the book), spending the entire time staring at me like I’m speaking Martian and don’t have any clue how to teach a room full of students (not true, four years of experience teaching, bitches), then she tells me how such and such won’t work or she’d do it this way and ends up making me feel the only possible option is the way she’d do it (hence the fact every single day the kids have a stupid selection test), if I planned and wrote it down and gave it to her to go over and she made comments and gave it back and I adjusted and she reviewed again, then I wouldn’t be mad. (Yes, that was in fact the longest sentence in the world. Thanks for noticing.) Even when I do make her a print out of what I’m planning, I’m still required to stand there and explain everything on it to her while she reads it, and then if she has changes (and she has never not had changes), she doesn’t make any marks. I’m expected to remember everything she says and go fix it and then go through the whole process over again. I’m a writing teacher. I understand rough draft, mark up the rough draft, return, revise, resubmit. I don’t understand the process I’m currently expected to go through.

Yet again, I could just be so wrong I can’t tell there’s a right way to do it.

I’m also wondering if I can plan my nervous breakdown to happen while I’m teaching. Except the kids would never know she and her stupidness drove me to it, and therefore they wouldn’t hate her like I’d want them to. I have considered breaking down (because when they question the stupid things I’m making them do because she says it’s the only way to get them to do work and learn anything I almost start crying) and saying, “I don’t want you to do this anymore than you do! I think it’s a waste of time, too! I think it’s busy work! I understand why you hate English; I’d hate English, too, if this was the bullshit I had to do every single day for 90 minutes! I want to have fun and learn amazing stuff in this class, but I’m told you can’t handle that and I have to do it this way. It sucks. It breaks my heart that you hate me and that you don’t even know how great this class could be, and it’s all the fault of that bitch of a teacher I’m supposed to be learning from.” I might eventually do it, because I’m so on their side about the crap I’m making them do I almost choke on the isntructions when I hand stuff out.

25 billion reasons why I don’t like Facebook

Everyone seems to be doing that inane “25 things you don’t know about me” meme on Facebook, and the annoying thing is that they’re tagging everyone on their “Friends” list to be “Included in this note.” I’ve been tagged about a dozen times now, and I’m not really sorry to admit that I haven’t read any of them. I love my friends, my real friends, my near and dear friends who are no longer so near and probably don’t consider me very dear because I’m not very good at the whole “being a good friend” thing, and I’d love to learn new things about them. I’m not exactly sure why it’s fun and entertaining to read about those things in list format, specifically a list of 25 things, but so it goes. I haven’t jumped on the bandwagon, mainly due to the fact I assume the reason people don’t know the 25 things on I’d put on my list is because they don’t want to know them. Or I don’t want them to know them.

(To be included on my list of 25 things if I ever make such a list: Multiple pronouns in the same sentence drive me crazy, especially when it sounds better to use them, but contextually it could possibly be confusing.)

I suppose the number one thing that would go on my list of 25 things you don’t know about me (“you” being some sort of mass personal pronoun meant to make everyone reading the list feel like they’re intimately involved with the person writing it) is that I have rheumatoid arthritis. I was diagnosed when I was 24 years old, but I became symptomatic when I was around 19. That means I spent five years having no idea why my body was seemed to be giving up, and my view on life changed a lot. When you think you’re going to be in a wheelchair before you’re 30, and you’re becoming so severely limited in how well your hands work at 21 that you’re pretty sure you’ll never be able to pick up a baby if you were to ever get around to having one, looking forward to the future isn’t as simple or as exciting as it should be.

There are a lot of things that are rolled up in my RA, things that don’t really need to be discussed right now, but the main thing is that I was diagnosed with a disease. A real, live disease, one that is permanent and debilitating. One that, if you’re lucky (and I am well aware of how extremely lucky I am), can be stabilized with medicine. Expensive medicine. Expensive medicine that has to be prescribed by expensive doctors, specialists, and has to be monitored through expensive things like frequent blood work and x-rays. I am lucky, I know I’m lucky, because my medicine was able to stop the progression of the disease and even reverse some of the damage that had already been done. I’m lucky because I have wonderful parents who have gone above and beyond to support me, keeping me on their insurance long after it was legal to do so, risking ridiculously large penalties if anyone ever does their research and sees that I’m not truly dependent, that my parents are really just beating the system so I’m not stuck on some crappy insurance plan with some enormous deductible (or, worse yet, student insurance) that doesn’t cover all the things that need to be covered for me to be healthy.

The thing about this disease, and the stuff needed to take care of me so I’m not being beat up by the disease, is that it has chained me down and forced me to make choices I would never have made if I was a healthy adult.

I wouldn’t have gone into the M.A.T. program. If for some strange reason I still did, I wouldn’t have stayed when I realized it wasn’t what I wanted.

(Even though this was prediagnosis and a long time ago) I would never have spent so much time with MS, hoping for him to decide he wanted to marry me, hoping I’d get a chance to start a family before I physically couldn’t.

I would never have decided it was so damn necessary to get married and have a family RIGHT NOW, which would have made most of the relationships in my life so much easier (both for my friends and my boyfriends).

I wouldn’t have come up with the crazy “I’ll get my M.A.T.!” plan, because it wouldn’t have mattered if I was on crappy student insurance (or no insurance at all).

I wouldn’t have pushed The Terrorist to make a commitment, to get engaged, because I wouldn’t have been adding up the years in my head and worrying about the time I wanted to spend married and settled before thinking about children.

(As a side note, something else in my list of 25 things you don’t know about me, I can’t just up and decide I’m ready to have kids. I have to carefully plan out the entire thing, because I take medicine I can’t take while pregnant, medicine I’ll have to have out of my system for a good bit of time before trying to get pregnant, and this is medicine that keeps me mobile and functioning. I also need to not only plan carefully for what is going to be going on in my life when I start that process, I have to make sure there’s money if I can’t work and good insurance that will be able to provide for the entire ordeal, like the good bit of draining gross fluid out of my knees I anticipate happening constantly. I have to make sure this goes into motion before I reach an age it could be difficult to get pregnant at, and an age where not taking the medicine could do worse and lasting damage to my body. Let’s not forget the added math if I might want to have more than one child, especially if I want to do something responsible and space them out appropriately.)

I wouldn’t worry that I’m moving too fast with the Goat. I probably wouldn’t be moving so fast, and therefore there’d be no worry. I wouldn’t keep thinking, “Oh my God, if he isn’t the one, I’m screwed.”

I would have up and quit when I realized nothing, absolutely nothing, about this student teaching experience is making me want to be a teacher.

I’d have submitted Ph.D. applications to try and get started in a program this coming fall.

I wouldn’t feel so guilty about saying all this or being upset by it, because I feel guilty about it all the time. There are so many people so much more worse off than I am, and they’re not as unhappy with their lives as I am. They aren’t letting their problems stop them.

I’d heal faster.

This is why I haven’t created a list of 25 things. They’d all be like this. And let’s be honest with each other: no one wants to know this.

Remember when I didn’t think I’d ever cut it as a teacher? I miss those days.

I probably haven’t mentioned it here, but this whole student teaching/becoming a real, live, grown-up high school English teacher isn’t turning out to be my cup of tea. Part of it stems from the fact that I’ve spent the past four, no, five years not knowing what the heck I was doing, making it up as I went, and doing my very own thing in my very own classroom. Sure, at the beginning I was scared out of my mind and wished upon every single star in the sky someone would tell me what I should (or, in my case, shouldn’t) be doing. I complained about the system and about the emphasis placed on college writing teachers to “change the world, one freshman at a time,” and I swore up and down freshmen composition courses that are left to the whims and whiles of the instructors aren’t really doing what freshmen composition courses are supposed to be doing: preparing students for four years of writing on the college level. I wanted to teach writing, to invite my students into discussions that challenged them by reading things that challenged them, and to get them to put themselves on paper, whether it was in a research paper about the use of steroids in baseball or in a personal essay about the experience of coming out. Sometimes what I wanted to happen in the classroom, what I planned and prepared and dreamed about, failed miserably. Sometimes the thing I figured out thirty seconds before I left the office (usually thanks to My Person™ telling me what she had done in her class, until she moved away and I had to ask Mitch, which wasn’t nearly as helpful or successful or even useful) went brilliantly. I often referred to myself as The Worst Teacher Ever™, but I didn’t often hate it. Rarely did I wish for different students (though I did spend a good part of my first year in the M.A. program wishing for a different book to teach from), and as much as grading papers sucks, there was something immensely satisfying about it.

Those days are gone.

I’m under the instruction and supervision of a mentor teacher and university supervisor. My university supervisor doesn’t really have any doubts about my teaching ability, and except for coming to Jesus every once in a while, she’s rather enjoyable. My mentor teacher isn’t the mentor teacher I feared. She hasn’t asked for formal, eight part lesson plans with stated objectives and the corresponding state standards done up in triplicate and submitted a week in advance, although that sort of behavior might have me just expire on the spot. She hasn’t told me I need to lose fifty pounds (I know that was an unreasonable fear, but I do need to lose fifty pounds, and I have this secret wish I’ll finally find someone to actually acknowledge this to my face) or dress better. Instead she’s scattered (I can’t find her desk for all the papers and folders and books and whatnot on top of it) and non-committal. She can’t provide me with reading schedules or lesson plans from her previous experiences teaching this course, and most of my “What have you done in the past with [insert piece of literature here]?” is met with “Um. Well, What would you do?” Whether it’s just her face or her demeanor or the fact she’s really too scattered to follow my line of thinking, those pop quizzes rarely end well for me. Instead my ideas, thrown out off the top of my head, are questioned further, critiqued, and handed back to me sliced, diced, and over salted. I know better than to walk into a classroom full of high school seniors completely unprepared, and I know that no matter how clear something is or how specific the requirements, there will be kids who need their hand held. Despite my experience, or, rather, because of it, I don’t have a bag of tricks to whip out when I come to a some new material. I believe that on some level, you just have to sit them down and make them talk about it, and sometimes you need to sit them down and make them write about it. There isn’t a reading guide for every book/story/poem/novel/play. There probably won’t be any at all in college. Not every single assignment has a rubric or a right answer. I can’t tell a student what to do if they don’t have ideas of their own. Teaching students to ask homogeneous questions, like the ones on study guides or graciously tucked in the margins of their text book in blue ink so they stand out, isn’t teaching them to think. It’s teaching them that there are right ways and wrong ways to look at a text or a movie or life, and that there are answers.

There aren’t always answers. Everything isn’t black and white. Reading and writing is about a whole hell of a lot more than comprehension.

I feel trapped. All the things I believe about writing and critical thinking, pedagogical things if you want to be all higher education about it, don’t seem to have a place in high school English language arts. I want to know what’s important to my students, what moves them, what they want to know about. I want to peak their interest, not by showing Batman Begins, but by getting them to think and feel and discuss texts that, even if they don’t realize it initially, are important to them. I want them to write, pages and pages and pages of writing, about themselves and the weather and their family and that asshole who won’t return their calls and what they’re reading and what they saw on TV last night and how they feel about what’s going on in the world and everything else. I want them to run out of letters they’ve written so much. I want ah-ha moments and complaints they’re being forced to do to much and failing grades and papers that have been revised ten times and finally get an “A.” I want them to know they can feel, that what they think and say is important, just as important as the Hebrews who wrote the Old Testament or whoever wrote the screenplay for Batman Begins.

The Goat suggested, if I decide to not be a teacher, that I could get a job at Ikea. Some people might say that I have a passion, and chucking it in the nearest recycle bin and going to work selling Swedish modular furniture would be a waste. I’m not sure that’s true, not only because Swedish modular funiture is amazing, but because it’s more than a little bit difficult to see what you want to do but not be able to do it because it’s just beyond the scope of what you’re supposed to do. This is why I stopped writing. I couldn’t stand working and feeling like I was supposed to say something, reach someone, when the opportunity to do that had passed me by, gotten just beyond my reach.

What would you do if you were me?

No hope.

I fear for the future when my students write things like this:

“Over the past decade same-sex relationships meaning gay or lesbian have become main stays in society. People have learned to accept it and others have become full-forced against it that violence and protests seem to be the end result. These types of relationships have not only created enormous controversy but should not be allowed for the better that men and women were put on earth to intervene and create offspring not love the same gender. Experiencing with the same gender is not the same as having a full-on relationship to the point where marriage may be in the future. Although people are to believe in what they want and go about that on their own, the attraction to their own sex does not fit into society and will never be accepted anywhere.

“From the get-go allowing same-sex relationships to happen and result in gay marriage kills a families stability. Most of the time families are destroyed when a mother or father finds out their children has become homosexual. Even worse when the mother and father finally come into reality they force the child to move out and do not want anything to do with them. Having to go through a change like this is hard for the parents because when people ask about their son, what can they do but say he turned homosexual.”

Is it wrong that when I read this sort of nonsense I start hoping that this kid winds up with a gay son or daughter? Because I do.