Okay, for many northern Virginia locations, today is
the first day of school. All of this
recalls the period when I worked as a substitute teacher, from April 2004 until
December 2005, and then again in the first part of 2007. I’ve covered the history of what happened
before, but in the long view, I have some more observations.
I did consider, with various degrees of seriousness,
the idea of a career switch, to becoming a full time math teacher, for some
time.
I did spend a lot of time, especially in the early
part of 2005, reviewing my graduate school math, and actually passed one of the
Praxis exams, given at the University of the District of Columbia in September
2005. There was a lot of hype at the
time about “no child left behind”, which tended to draw the attention down to
the need for more teachers in the elementary areas and at basic levels, not at
the AP level.
I’ve documented before how sometimes I got drawn
into situations, especially with special education, which were more personal
than I would have expected to be welcomed into, given my lack of experience as
a parent,, or with marriage or courting women.
In the years since, the gay marriage debate might well have changed the
spin on how I felt about this angle of it.
The AB (and IB, depending on the school) students
were great. I wonder about the speculations about the maturation of the teen
brain, however, when on at least one occasion, as a motorist, I’ve had to stop
suddenly to avoid a kid I recognized (as a good student) riding the wrong way
on a major road in Arlington without a helmet, unaware that a driver who have
no reason to look for him coming the wrong way.
Yes, it’s a nice jolt to see that person in a bar doing well years later.
When I considered the “career switch”, I was already
deep into the world of self-broadcast of my punditry. “Those were the days” (as the 1968 song goes)
before social media were influential (Myspace was catching on then), but my own
flat sites were well indexed in search engines (for free, with no attempts at
commercial optimization) so anyone could find what I had to say, on my
own. And people did, as we know from
what happened (especially the posting July 27, 2007).
The biggest problem was the potential that students
could discern my own quirky attitudes about others from search engine
arguments. Indeed, I could tell from
server logs (on Urchin, and later Google Analytics) that people often did look
for edgy things in combination with actors’ names in my movie reviews. That could be serious enough to create a
problem. If I became a permanent teacher
and had the power to give grades and affect colleges and careers (in the
generation I grew up in, that could mean keeping a student deferment from the
Vietnam era military draft), then the ability to discern my own likes from
search engines (even in the pre-Facebook world) could pose serious legal
problems This was part of what I saw as “conflict
of interest” going back to the issue I had with the military gay ban (writing a
book on it while I worked with the military indirectly) back in the 1990s.
Still, I thought for some years that there must be
some way to work this out. The world
might have worked out differently for me had the “Do Ask, Do Tell” books (there
were two of them then, as well as “Our Fundamental Rights” from 1998) paid for
themselves with pure hard and softcover book sales. This was the pre-Kindle or early ebook
era. What I did was get hundreds of
thousands of page requests by allowing the book text to be offered free, in
simple HTML (not even PDF). It’s actually
very easy to read flat HTML text on an iPhone right now; you don’t need
PDF. You don’t really need eBook, unless
you have to get paid. Which is kind of
the rub, isn’t it. In the Old World, the
contents of books got a reputation when they sold (most of all supermarket
romances and perhaps Stephen King) but they remained fixed in time,
limited. Internet content could change
all the time, and communicate attitudes in a way not encountered when publishing
was simply “commercialized”. So had the
books generated their buzz for a while, gotten “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” lidted,
and then faded, it would have been a different world. Teaching would have made sense. Maybe I could have tried to get an Med at GWU
and would have taught calculus. I’d be about ready to retire from that
now. But I would have paid my own way,
earned my own karma.
You can look for “career switch” on YouTube and find
switches both into and out of teaching.
One video does refer to switching for “laid off teachers”. It’s all murky.
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