Project Management II

What is R doing for the next six weeks?

That's right, I'm teaching first- and second-year Spanish to ninth-grade students. And it's been a fascinating couple of days so far. I am absolutely overloaded with observations about how this new adventure is going. Whether it's how to select appropriate activities, assess learning, or even just monitor the pace and rhythm of class time, I feel like I've just opened so very many loops of thought at once that I'm going to collapse from exhaustion thinking about them all. The car ride home, still the seventy-minute trip I've had for two-plus years now, has felt like a living and breathing world in which what did happen, may happen, and commands my attention without interruption. Just so pressing and all-consuming...odd.

Aside from weighing pedagogic options and thoughts along the lines of what is and is not working as education in itself, I think that getting to know so many new people, even for just the few minutes that I spend with any one person, is just such a performance. I mean that it's tiring work to be "on" for so many hours in a row. I know I've blogged about this before, but I'll say it again: there is a very strange "flow state" after effect in which you just feel like you're "back" into some kind of recognizably not task-oriented self-consciousness in a way that's like getting thrown out of a car. I've been living in respite-free teacher mode for what seems like dozens of hours in a row.

I better stop writing and go to sleep. I'm hampered enough as it is by my lack of editing; this post can only be the more disjointed and, to some not-in-a-bad-bad sense, but nonetheless in a real-felt-I-recognize-something-like-it way frustrating. A frustration borne of the promise that interpretation yields a reward, that you would be transformed somehow, taken into a state of knowledge or better yet awareness of something that was once not there. And at the end of one of these researches, you ask if the minutes in which you gave yourself over to something like this flow-state in trying to comprehend and perhaps evaluate something like a judgment or relation that some other mind put forth do indeed change you.