the median of meaningful
I’m realizing that what bothers me about teaching is everything feels way too important. In prepping my lessons, the slides, the activities, etc., I have to always be thinking about how all those things affect the kids. How do they enhance their understanding? How do they engage them? Could I be more flexible in certain areas, or are there skills or topics I really need the kids to understand in a certain way? How can I design this class such that they interact more with each other, have more agency over their learning, can keep up?
Dropping the ball on any aspect of teaching feels huge. When a lesson flops, I feel like I wasted my kids’ time and mine. My evenings are spent thinking about how to get the next one right. There’s no part of this job where I feel I can relax my grip or afford to phone it in, and being constantly on and thinking about all these interweaving parts is exhausting.
Maybe it’s a sign of novice, me only being able to see each part of teaching at 100% importance, but I am a novice and that’s how it feels.
I went back to teaching after my office job because I felt the office job was fun and easy but so so meaningless. But now I think teaching might be far too meaningful, to the point of being overwhelming. I’d like to know if there’s a job out there that’s between these two extremes, that’s closer to the middle of meaningful. I’d like to do work for something I believe in and find important, but that doesn’t constantly require 100% of my time and attention and energy and will let me have my other meaningful (but maybe more personal) pursuits.
I do have an answer to this already, actually: The path I’m looking for exists, and it’s called information preservation. But I can’t drop teaching—not when I’m almost done with my program. Not when it’s a job that can get me out of here, to somewhere where I can eventually pivot to something that doesn’t have my shoulders up by my ears all the time.
I kind of wish I realized this about teaching much later, after a few years of experience under my belt. But instead I’m stuck feeling uneasy about a career path I’m deciding to stick with anyway for at least a few years until I get the things I need (something substantial on my resume, PR in a country with a library culture). I think that’s where most of the dread is coming from—knowing how I feel, and knowing I’ll have to sit with it for the foreseeable future.
Anyway, time to get back to work.