several job interviews tomorrow. the focus suddenly intensifies on the CAREER, on the FUTURE, and what JOB i will have once my current contract ends in june. its becoming more and more appealing to me to find a job up north somewhere and get a place with kim for awhile. i am not sure if that is just my fear of leaving for a new place where i would be LONELY because i would know NO ONE there. that's not to say the idea of living with kim and staying in the chicago area is a bad one, its just i had never really considered staying until recently. who knows, maybe she worked her magic on me again.

i did realize something in the car today. i realize a lot of things in the car. do other people do this? am i the only one who has their mind drift entirely from the music to these grand epiphanies each day? today's realization was that schools basically are institutions of assimilation. we train young people on how to think, how to learn, what is proper and improper to say, and most importantly, how to act. we teach them to behave correctly and when they do not we write them up. if they cannot learn to act correctly, like all the other students do, they get booted from school for awhile. they have to learn how to live within the system of the school, which is practice for the REAL WORLD. when they are out of school and still have not learned to assimilate, they go to jail for committing crimes because they never learned the things you can and cannot do. they never learned self-control and that there was a way to function in society. as much as i preach creativity and student choice, as much as i declare that my students will learn to empower themselves using communication skills and language arts tools, i am forcing them to conform and abandon many individual characteristics.

now, this isn't entirely a bad, "1984" George Orwell thing. some students, the repeat offenders who can't figure out how not to piss others off, need to let go of those personal traits in order to develop interpersonal skills. if a student never learns how to act in a non-abusive-threatening-adversarial way, its likely they won't be able to form solid relationships with anyone. so it comes back to this: i help kids learn how to interact with the world around them. or is that still too big?

sorry about the teaching tangent. with all these interviews coming up its been laying wall-to-wall carpet in my mind.