For those who have been under a rock or kicked off Twitter, I signed up to take the LSAT tomorrow. I signed up a while back and I was studying even before then, but it still doesn’t seem like I’ve prepared enough. I still keep getting the same damn score on the PrepTests even after reading two of the PowerScore books cover to cover. While my insecure/PMSy side is quick to chalk this up to me being a retard, the rational side is quick to point out that school started and I had to waste an awful lot of good studying hours grading Fs and I was in St. Louis for a week, and that while doing Logic Games on the plane to the Bahamas is studying, it’s not like I did any of it while there. In other words, I am my own worst enemy. There’s also the matter of it not mattering whether I get a 158 or a 120 since I can’t really afford to go back to school full time anyway. It’s just not in the budget. And, I realize Chuck Wendig says writing is a real job, but not for someone with $60K in student loans who, you know, isn’t all that good at writing.
If we couple this with the fact that there don’t seem to be any jobs in South Florida (no, those job fairs offering minimum retail slave wages don’t count unless you’re more desperate than I am; that’s what we call underemployment), we realize I’m going to be stuck teaching forever. FOREVER. I mean, retirement has become a more fanciful concept than unicorn farts and once you’re in for a while no one believes you were ever capable of anything else anyway. Supermodel for three years? Oh, sure that coke-addled grape vomiting waif looks like she could run a Fortune 500 company. Teacher for six months? Oh, well, it says you’re a teacher. Can you do anything else? Why are you leaving teaching? Don’t you care about America’s kids? Is this because all teachers do is steal from the government all summer? I can’t hire you. You don’t seem trustworthy.
*head desk*
And I mean, sure, I want to “make a difference” and all. That’s actually one of the draws to law school because lawyers seem to be the only people left who can get a word in edgewise in this screaming circus we call a society. Except “making a difference” doesn’t pay all that well and I already owe $60K in student loans and I can’t afford to be a full-time student and I already have a shit-paying job that expects too much. And “making a difference” is not defined as spending days covering a relatively simple topic only to spend night after night after night grading papers that show the disrespectful, talking-over-you, no consequences-allowed kids have about as much understanding of integers as a puppy has of the hadron collider.
Which leads to my whole terror of being trapped forever in this broken institution called “education” (or at least until that elected criminal we call Governor Skelator, who honestly seems too much like a cartoon villain for this three-dimensional world, sends us all to work chain gangs or something). Teachers? They have no say anymore. About anything. Governments steal our hours, our retirement money, our tenure, our pensions, and our time. School boards dictate what we say and the order we say it. Textbook companies dictate the order we teach our subjects. The students are allowed to dictate how teach. Yet, we’re lectured on our “professionalism” as though we should think of ourselves as experts and we’re required to take “professional development” classes in our spare time to “further our knowledge” of whatever asshattery the boards and legislatures have deemed valuable. They want us to behave like robots but expect us to be “accountable.” We’re told the “value added model” will account for things outside the classroom (never mind the whole “value added model” being dismissed as junk statistics by leading researchers in public policy), yet then we’re told the model won’t include socioeconomic status. So the thing that’s supposed to account for what’s outside the classroom doesn’t account for the biggest indicator of test scores outside the classroom?
Basically, I’m just tired of people peeing on my leg, telling me it’s raining and then getting mad for pointing out that no, clearly you are peeing on my leg. The sky is blue, there are no clouds, but your penis is fully visible and a stream of last night’s beer is aimed at my leg.
I’m tired of being told I’m responsible for everything in a society where I look around and find I’m with a handful of other people on this responsibility island and everyone else, including those calling all the shots, are free to do whatever the hell they want to.
I’m sick of worrying about why I never got a “real job” in a third-world country where the rich have stolen all the money and run off to leave us bagging groceries and handing out fast food from a window.
Maybe I just need to learn to surf and take up selling Sanuk sandals all day. Those things are unbelievably comfortable.
I’m going to try this again, in less foul-mouthed (but not cuss-free) manner.
Teachers, from where this particular jackass is standing, probably get the shortest end of the stick that all of us who work what I call Shut Up And Take It jobs know all too well. Administrators and politicians all trot out the For The Children! banter that is gobbled up and regurgitated in an endless loop of bullshit, when really it’s all just career/political maneuvering, and then, as if that little trip isn’t enough, they scapegoat the teachers without remorse.
If you decide to go through with your LSAT, I hope you ace it. Just the idea of someone escaping the mire of a dead-end job for something better puts me in the cheering section.
Finally, on the writing, whatever you do, don’t quit, and don’t sell yourself short. I know that’s an easy thing to say, but as someone with a brain tuned into the “I fucking suck!” mental radio, I understand getting discouraged about it all. But just keep going with it.
Thanks!
*tries to change station* *tries to drown out “I fucking suck” station with J-pop*
At least I now get to go back to sucking at writing, something I think I’m improving at even if I still suck instead of studying without any seeming progress.
Anyway, thanks.