Teaching 101: Not as Easy as It Looks

So, here’s the thing: You go through life thinking teaching is so easy. That harks back to grade school, I think. Back when your sense of appreciation for the people up by the chalkboard was none too high. Why would it be? They always took offense to you sailing paper airplanes across the room, and they never found funny a spitball lodged so deep in a buddy’s ear that it required surgical tweezers. I mean, come on — that’s funny! At some point, most of us gained a bit of fondness for our teachers, but I can’t say we ever stopped thinking what they did was easy. That anyone with the right amount of chalk or a pair of reading glasses dipped low along their nose could do it. Because it’s teaching, right? I mean, you get up there, you say some stuff, you write it on the chalkboard for emphasis, you snap at a couple of kids — “I’m warning you. I once bit the ears off an alligator! — and then you write on reports, “Your prepositional phrases don’t cohabitate with your conjunctivitis.” Easy peasy. Anyone can do it. Your whole life you think this, and your whole life you would continue thinking it … right up until the moment you walk into the classroom yourself, stand up by the board and think, “Holy fish sticks! What in the heck am I supposed to say?”

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Work Without Beer?!? The Horror!

It’s unfortunate really, because I had been feeling so good about work. So lucky. So content. So, well, happy just to have a job. But it was more than that. I was feeling fulfilled. Part of that is I get to work with college students — as a student newspaper adviser and now also as a teacher thanks to my opinion writing class. There are few things better than being able to help mold and meld partially-solidified minds. It’s rewarding. And it doesn’t hurt that you can occasionally call them names like “meatball” and “mullet head.” (When I’m really on my game I’ll string them together like: “You mullet-headed meatball!” So I had been pretty happy on the work front. That is, until I read that Wall Street Journal article. Why am I always looking to newspapers for personal enrichment? It was a front-page piece that — tragically — forced me to look at my job in a whole new light. Frankly, work will never be the same again. I thought I had it good, but turns out it was just a mirage. I’m being duped. What was the story about, you ask? The headline read: “Drinking on the job comes to a head at Carlsberg.”

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The Running of the Eggs

Knee-deep in children — trudging through a virtual tsunami of half-pints — is when it occurred to me: Group Easter egg hunts are an awful lot like the running of the bulls. Sure, there are some obvious differences. Bulls don’t wear Crocs. They sport horns and are all-too-eager to tickle your kidneys with them. They snort, stomp and charge down narrow streets while guys dressed in white scream, “Why didn’t I give up drinking like my wife asked!?!” Yet, as I stood with my daughter among the hordes of little ones, all waiting to rush the baseball fields at Palencia, I couldn’t help but think of all the similarities.

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80s Music Isn’t Retro Anymore?!?

I guess it was bound to happen. For eons now, the music of my youth — 80s music — has been considered retro. Ultra hip. Totally cool. Able to transcend generations and stay relevant even though it was more than 20 years old. (Or that it sounded like a Casio keyboard having a seizure.) But I got a shock to the system the other day. I was in the car listening to National Public Radio when someone said that 80s music is no longer retro. The “new retro,” they said, is now 90s music. Nineties! I was floored. Flabbergasted. I nearly crashed into a telephone pole. How could 80s music be out of fashion? It was always ABOUT fashion (bad fashion, but fashion all the same.) How could this be? Was there a vote? Had anyone consulted with us, the children of MTV.

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