Diary of an Unemployed Wanderer, Part 8

September 30, 2012

I’m squatting in an abandoned building.

I’m stealing internet from the apartment complex next door.

I’m squandering what little power there is in this building for a blog post that probably isn’t being read by anybody.

…that’s a lot of ‘s’ words.  S has this sort of sound that just sounds sinister.  We use the s sound all the time.  And most of the time it gives a sort of evil…sly connotation.  Smack, slither, smoke, it just rolls off the tongue in a sort of onomatopoetic manner.  And now I’m thinking about onomatopoeia.

I’m an English teacher, and I’m in the middle of nowhere, southern style.  My books, god my books, are probably being ignored in some evidence locker.  If there are people interested in finding me since I fled town…well, I’d like to thank you if you’re reading this blog.  You’re quite likely the only people doing so.  All I’m doing right now is writing words.

Writing words.  Again, the sound of ‘w’.  We never think about the sound of our words.  They were invented, something we so commonly forget.  But down the line somebody saw a man scratching out lines in the sand and called it writing, because it sounded correct.  And it did, it does.  As human beings have evolved…not just by millennia, but by years, days, even hours…we have made decisions that create new words, eliminate others.  These are ideas in action, and I am missing it all because I am not in the classroom.

Damn it all, I’m not in the classroom.  I don’t deserve to be, no one deserves to be in the classroom.  I don’t know of anyone that deserves to walk into a room and declare themselves to be an authority on anything other than what they did within the last five minutes.  But teachers are able to circumvent this, and start thinking about not being authority figures, and instead be facilitators of learning.  I wish I was a facilitator of learning.  Right now I’m just a facilitator of internet comments and the story of “guess which homeless guy I met today”.

Teaching is a full-time job, and one of the most rewarding out there.  For those of you who are still reading this, I apologize for disgracing the profession.  Hopefully you can make it better.

Thanks for listening.