16 September 2013

Changing a Tire the Frustrating Way

     In the middle of April, it rained for two weeks straight. I was teaching a remedial English class at a campus thirty miles away and was required to give a standardized, three-part exam one week early. I dropped my fiancé off at home in a downpour and was right on schedule. I only had ten minutes of leeway in my commute, but I had never been late to class, even in the middle of Michigan’s unreliable winter.
     I was on the phone with my friend J. when I hit a microwave-sized pothole. For a few milliseconds, it sounded and felt like Thor was trying to golf my car out of the rough with Mjölnir.

27 February 2013

YGOD - An Airport Story

Author's note: I wrote this back in 2010. I made a few revisions, mostly grammatical stuff, today, so I figured I'd throw it up on the blog. It's not great, but it has its moments. I never did send it to U.S. Airways...

     The day started out so well. I woke up next to a beautiful girl on a pullout bed in a D.C. hotel room. It’s not what you think. It is six in the morning and she has to get ready for work. Another friend of mine and her mom, in the bed seven feet away from us, have to get ready to travel back to Chicago. I pull a pillow over my head and hope I can get back to sleep before all the lights start turning on and the hairdryers start whining.
       They wake me up an hour later. I stumble around trying to decide if I should eat breakfast and then take a shower or vice versa. This is a difficult decision when you’re trying to fight out of the hazy cocoon of drowsiness. I take my shower, decide that blue plaid best reflects my mood, and head downstairs to eat a waffle with E., H., and B. Small talk predominates; the moments leading up to goodbyes are always profoundly awkward: everyone wants to say something meaningful, but no one wants to acknowledge that the time they’ve spent together is coming to an end. We all tacitly agree not to make a big deal out of separating.

28 January 2013

Becoming a Good Teacher in a Few Simple Steps

Author's note: this essay started as a three-page assignment I was working on with my class almost three years ago (I try to write all the assignments I make my students write). It got a little carried away. I'm not 100% sure I agree with me-from-the-past about everything, but I'm still teaching and loving it, even though the compensation is, well, insulting. Enjoy!

            As it turns out, a lot of idiots and morons get involved in trying to become teachers. In fact, there is a strong possibility that you had several teachers over the course of your educational career who barely passed their education or content classes in college. There is certainly a cavalcade of reasons for this lack of intelligence among teachers. Iowa, for example, has no G.P.A. requirement for entrance into the education program for their state. It might also be true that stupid people just want to become teachers. One source online claims that “today’s K-12 teachers have the lowest average SAT scores of people in any professional occupation” (Nemko). While I generally consider myself outside the categories of “idiots” and “morons” (there is a subtle difference between the two terms, particularly as they were applied in early psychological diagnoses, and most would agree that knowing this puts me outside of both categories), I actually received a C+ in Calculus II and a D- in my final history thesis seminar during my undergraduate experience. There may be perfectly legitimate explanations for these anomalies in my academic career (how else does one explain my almost-perfect, straight-A educational background, my 4.0 M.A. grade point, or my well-above-average GRE percentile scores?), but I certainly encountered a fair share of, well, dummies while I went through the tortuous process of becoming an educator, and the scene hasn’t changed much now that I teach college writing as an adjunct.