lots of things to say tonight, and i'll probably short-change you because it's late and my brain is just on overdrive so i'll likely think faster than i can type and forget things by the time the keystrokes are completed. unnecessarily and uncomfortably long opening sentence? check. proceed with the incoherent ramblings! today i applied for a lot of jobs and wrote music for a song i wrote last night. the song is about harry potter. well, it's about wizards within the harry potter universe. well, it's a hypothetical dealing with my own potential lifestyle if said universe were real.
yeah, okay, i'm a huge nerd. moving on.
tuesday night is usually date night, but christin didn't feel like going to the movies. so we stayed at the house for the evening and did our thang. she applied for a job, which is great, we looked at some places to live and did general internet things and caught up on last week's episode of the big bang theory, which was fantastic. i started the process of installing the new world of warcraft patch, but as of now i'm working on my third consecutive installation. this one looks like it won't fail. thanks a lot, laptop with tiny hard drive.
after christin went to sleep, or rather after she was supposed to have gone to sleep [she was still up], i went to the movies anyway because the film i wanted to see was a limited release and i wanted to make sure i got to see it in theatres. also, because today is $6 tuesdays and i'm cheap. so very, very cheap. so i saw 'waiting for superman,' and to say that it was an excellent film would be one of the greatest understatements i've ever made. so i won't say that. it was life-changing, from my perspective as a future teacher. yeah, to say it's life-changing, that's a start.
watching the documentary, which details the abject failure of the united states' public schooling system and the repugnant evil of the teachers unions, really woke me up to the way i'm treating my current educational experience. i'm sitting here in a theatre, hearing these stories about kids in crappy parts of the country placing their hopes and dreams at the merciless hand of the charter school lottery... and i can't help but think that i would be wasting my time if i were aiming for anything less than learning to be the best teacher i could possibly be.
i know that i'm already a good teacher, and i know that i won't ever be a 'bad teacher,' much less a teacher as horrible as some of the ones shown in the film. however, i'm not taking my schooling nearly as seriously as i should be, in the sense that i'm sort of sifting through theories and ideas and practices and holding on to what i already believed from my limited experience as a teacher and calling it good. i'm looking at school as a means toward a piece of paper that will get me a visa to teach in hong kong.
and that's just totally unacceptable.
granted, it shouldn't take seeing a documentary to make me realize that education is valuable, but the relative ease of skating through classes [i put virtually no effort into the majority of my classwork and i'm still maintaining a 4.0 gpa] makes you complacent. it makes it easier to look at things the way i did before i saw it. i needed this film, i needed something to make me care more than i already did about education. i needed something to make me believe that, as taylor mali said more crudely than i will re-print: 'teachers make a difference, now how about you?'
yeah. so i'm not going to go into all the things i said in my head after seeing the movie, about how i would pledge to read more and take more interest in the subjects or devote more time to going back and re-reading textbooks and memorizing theories. i'm not going to make any sort of public promise like that, but i'll say that i'm surely going to make a greater effort not to cheat myself out of my own education in the future, because i'm surely doing that now. for now, it's time for bed, and we'll see what that means in terms of practicality tomorrow.
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