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The Platypus Reads Part XXIV

It's funny, but it's true; during the school year I have to shut half my brain off so that I can teach.

Bare me out on this one. You can't walk into a room full of eighth graders and say: "Modern America can only be understood in terms of Nietzsche's understanding of the creative man, or "over-man," as the maker of values via his will-to-power perversely democratized so that all of us can become value-generators." Well, you can, but they'll just look at you funny and roll their eyes. That's not to say that teaching teenagers doesn't require any real mental effort, quite the opposite, but that it uses certain mental faculties to the limit while demanding that others be temporarily suspended. You have to figure out how to communicate complex information in a way that they can grasp and run with. When you're mentally sparing with them, you still have to keep one hand behind your back. The goal is to help them develop their abilities, not to crush them with your massive brain. The part of my brain devoted to navigating those tricky waters gets worked to exhaustion during the school year. The other half, the half that desperately wants a long jaw with an Oxford trained mind, has to lay dormant.

Summer is when the other half of me gets let out of the basement. Practically, this means that I read about five books at once. The closer to the school year, the more difficult the fair. This summer, I've already long since exhausted my projected reading list, and so I'm having to make up more as I go. Sometimes it feels like my brain is on over-drive.

So what does all this mean? Well, for one thing, it means that my list of posts under the heading of "The Platypus Reads" is growing at an alarming rate (and I'm not posting on all the books I'm reading). Secondly, it means that I understand why teachers get that time off during the summer. Summer is your chance to remember that you're an adult again. It's a time to let out those parts of you that you have to stifle during the year in order to get by. Don't get me wrong, I love teaching, and I care about my students, but it comes at a price. Summer's reminding me of that fact right now.

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Linds said…
You put it entirely perfectly! I've been trying to figure out why my poor li'l brain is so sluggish when it comes to the two papers I have due at Stanford next week - that's it exactly. I think I'm having unusual trouble shifting gears from breaking complexity into bite-sized chunks to rebuilding complexity in my own argument.

Well, that and it takes awhile to start using four and five syllable words again without defining them with smaller synonyms immediately after saying them. :)
12:08 PM
James said…
Oh good, it's not just me. I was talking to one of our fellow chums the other day, and he's actually cutting down to 3/4 time so that he can do some real professional development and writing. His theory is that if people want better high school teachers, they should treat them more like college profs and less like cogs in the machine.
2:40 PM
Linds said…
I fully agree with our fellow chum! I've often wistfully contemplated what good I could do with a sabbatical. Or enough time to actually write a good paper for grad school. My kids would have twice the teacher they do now. Maybe three times.
11:48 PM
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