Friday, December 29

Fast times at Winthrop Middle School

So, it's been a while since I last posted. Not much has happened, actually. I've played a few videogames and I've typed up a few new lessons. Unfortunately not a whole lot has become any clearer to me about teaching, life in general, videogames, or the relationships between any of these things. These are the places I'm looking for answers to my questions. Currently, my questions consist of:

Time spent getting physically fit > Time spent doing other things?

Money spent on objects which bring joy > Money, or potential for these objects?

Experience of videogames > experience of movies, books, comic books, etc? Note: The answer to this is most likely no, that videogames are less engaging than all of these things, which is distressing to me. I have been searching the videogame universe for some meaningful art.

Staying up late and bending the fabric of my universe > getting enough sleep to get to work on time?

My responsibility for my students to learn > my students' responsibility to learn?

Other questions are harder to phrase. I am letting my ability to get sad overwhelm me lately, because I like that feeling. It's empowering to be miserable, because you can call something your sadness and push it into one part of your life while you call the rest of yourself a genius. It's egotistical.

I am also wondering whether teaching in my school is really benefitting me by hardening me, or whether I should be at another school learning to perfect my style and become a stronger educator, whatever that means.

Fortunately, I'm not dead, have been drawing pay, and have been doing well enough in my graduate classes to stay in the Fellows program. I'm also not obese yet, despite hundreds of thousands of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on multigrain bread.