Out of the clear blue surprised sky, I had a lovely long chat with an acquaintance today at the grocery store. Most of it revolved around granola bars (you had to be there) but we eventuallyly moved on to the placement of various items.
We were both intrigued to notice that the frozen pie section of the store in question is almost as large or perhaps even larger than the milk section. This puzzled us. Do people really eat that many or more fruit pies in between visits? The placement of Cool Whip (tm) next to the pies made sense to us, but do people really need even more of it than of, say, cheese? At least with cheese, room needs to be made to fit in all of the different brands, varieties, etc. but there are only so many Cool Whip options out there. Yet the bank of Cool Whip is far larger than the cheese area.
By the time we'd moved on to comparing the size of the bread section to the size of the Hostess snack section (yes, John, I did mention your traditional breakfast) we concluded that we really needed to either #1 get out more or #2 go back to graduate school and get the MBA degree. Both of us opted for the former!
On a more somber note, the "oh my GOD what am I going to do with the rest of my life and is this windmill really worth tilting?" dilemma still hangs over my head. Most of the time I percolate and weigh my options, but every now and again it truly makes me want to scream. Lousy teachers get to work as profs because they wrote a good dissertation, but I, a good teacher with a less than perfect dissertation, am supposed to - do what?
3 comments:
Just to set the record straight, I am down to eating Hostess for breakfast roughly twice a week.
I replaced Hostess with Burger King's Enormous Omelet Sandwich 2 or 3 times a week. One sausage patty, two eggs, two American cheese slices and three strips of bacon, all on a bun.
For those still counting, that's four layers of breakfast with 730 calories oozing 47 grams of fat.
And best of all I can eat it while driving to work.
Now you know why my wife calls me an animal.
In all seriousness, have you ever thought of teaching on the high school level? You strike me as having the teaching passion, and you probably already have the credentials (minus the student teaching?).
You seem to have a passion to teach, less so to research. I'll bet that high school students would do good to learn social studies/history/givernment from you.
The pay won't be as good, but we need good high school teachers.
Well, Lemming, there's an old Latvian folk proverb that says, "Never ask an idiot with a keyboard for advice, for he is sure to oblige."
(Or maybe there isn't an old Latvian folk proverb to that effect. But if there's not, there maybe should be.)
Anyway, my advice -- worth nearly every cent that it costs you -- is to persevere. You set out to become Dr. Lemming for a reason: I would assume it's because that's what you want. Unless you've truly changed your mind about that, don't let these so-and-so's stop you. Revise, resubmit, defend, whatever it takes ... and let us know here that you're still on track, because we're needy that way.
With all respect to John B., I don't know that I'd be teaching high school ... and it doesn't have a thing to do with the money (which actually ain't all that bad). I'd avoid it because education at the secondary level or lower is basically prison: your students are required to be there. Some of them may want to be there anyway, but the compulsion sets the atmosphere. Might as well go ahead and be a corrections officer directly, and eliminate the middleman.
I close with an old Ugandan folk proverb: "Take my advice ... I'm certainly not using it."
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