rant is where the heart is

diaryland: sirilyan.diaryland.com: entry for 2000-12-20 (12:26:07)
In which our plucky young hero ran very hard to end up where he started.

I'm a college dropout, thanks for asking. But I have a good reason, or at least a collection of mediocre reasons that are more than the sum of their parts.

Upon graduating from high school, I immediately dove into what I thought would be a fulfilling college career: French immersion, leading to a career teaching high school English.

(No, really.)

(Stop laughing.)

I spent a year learning enough French to learn in French at Universit� Sainte-Anne, Nova Scotia's only francophone university, in preparation for their beautiful, magical program, the four-year combined Arts/Education degree.

It was in May of my first year at U. Sainte-Anne that the Ministry of Education decided that too many teachers were being put on the market, so in order to prevent that travesty of justice, the BA/BEd program would get cut. Anyone who was already in it would be grandfathered, but anyone who wasn't yet... well...

(Hint: Rhymes with "can go duck themselves sideways with a plain saw".)

I'd already become disillusioned with university, for reasons I can explain later if I get in the mood, so this was just more fuel on the fire. Instead of a year of immersion, four years of work, and a nice job teaching tenth-graders about the magic of Shylock, I was now looking forward to four years of an arts degree, followed by another two years for education. Seven years in one university, a school which had 450 students in total, in a village with a population of about 450.

Er, no.

I bolted. I ran. Over the course of my higher education I had realized how little I wanted to work with kids, especially teenagers. (The magic word is "misanthrope".) I'd learned that I didn't want to teach. So I moved out west, and settled into a series of programming jobs, writing code for all sorts of weird and wacky purposes, and even once for the federal government. (Shudder.)

But since then, the strangest thing's happened... I'm teaching, or at least informing, and finding that I enjoy it. I like helping turn a light on for people, I even like answering questions that arrive in email. I find myself wanting to teach even more, even though it's called "training" now that I'm a grownup.

Maybe it's because I'd be dealing with all sorts of people, not just kids. Maybe it's because it pays better. Maybe I just still don't know who I really am, and it's no coincidence a recurring theme when I have bad dreams is having to write an English 11 exam on a book I didn't bother to read.

Or maybe I just like to read myself think, and I like it when my words get treated as more important than they really are. But that'd just be narcissistic, wouldn't it?

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