A week ago I got my rejection notice from that Latin education program I had applied to. I really should have applied to more programs but I wanted to do this local one as I am sick of all the moving I've been doing the past few years and I probably wouldn't have gotten into anything anyway this time around as I have been away too long and the one class I've taken this semester will not be seen as having resuscitated my linguistic ability thought I have in fact pretty much gotten myself back to where I left off as an undergraduate. It also hurts me that I've never really known what I wanted to do with my life. Even now me real reason for wanting to go into teaching is because struggling with off and on employment, searching the want ads and thinking about selling my motorcycle to really, really sucks. You don't get rich in teaching I know, but you get a living wage and your summers off, which is a hell of a deal compared to anything I've ever had. But what I was going to say is that I don't have the kind of background that people have who have had a better idea of what they wanted to do; people who get into teaching will typically have been camp counselors and done tutoring and volunteered for literacy programs and whatnot. I was always just a lonely alienated kid with the people skills of a rock and ADD and not much hope for his future.
But where there's life there's hope. At this point I'm calling my project of getting into teaching "Operation Clark Kent".
I want to start doing substitute teaching in the fall to build up some background, make me look like a good candidate for a teaching program.
Aside from having the people skills of a rock something that also doesn't help me assimilate to the Educational community is that I am not at all cut from the psychointellectual mold that lends itself to institutional thinking, meaning that i have very little respect for authority and i dislike the notion that one's self-worth should be connected with one's identification with and performance within and institution. I dislike the values of performance and cultural conformity/assimilation that I see school promulgating; although you could certainly argue for the profoundly important practical applications of this cultivation of attitudes, you could say that if this had worked successfully on my I would likely not be the unemployed loser i am today. On the other had you might contend that I am thus explicitly because of those values and the absence of a place within them for a person like me. Perhaps it's neither here not there.
You could also say the SG is a medium whose values of open sexual expression and the development of highly individual personal aesthetics run contrary to mainstream conformist values. Lots of SG's write about having to cover tattoos and remove piercings in order to get jobs. our culture is far less tolerant of peopel who are really different than It would like to think it is. Schools play a big part is shaping cultural mores in that direction. The think about it is that it doesn't necessarily have to be that way, it's just that instutions like people who like institutions; groups like people who identify with groups, religions with people who like religion, and so forth.
Let me start again, if you've endured thus far. The ADD can get me typing off on tangential thoughts. Such things as tattoos and piercings and mohawks and sexual expression are generally looked down upon in Pedagogical, as opposed to educational, settings. What happens is that this tends to create an antithetical relationship between learning and passion, which is a profoundly insidious and toxic cultural mistake. It makes people who have a strong streak of free spiritedness feel highly alienated from teachers and then from their capitallist masters, most of whom will wish to pound them into standard molds of what comprises and acceptable person. I have reservations about getting into an educational career for this reason, but the way I see it people who want to really be themselves deserve to get a good education every bit as much as people who wish to assimilate, and it seems to me that maybe I could do some good, quietly subverting the system from the inside, not getting confrontational with it but just letting kids know that not every grownup sees unmitigated virtue in swallowing everything that their teachers and parents and churches and mass media feed them. Still another redundant way of putting it is that pedagogy is what's drilled into children to make them good citizen and viable economic production units, whereas education is largely self-inflicted in my view, a mind determines its own direction of growth.
Anyway "operation clark kent" involves the careful disguising of any personal opinions that might run contrary to the orthodoxies of such persons as may consider me for graduate school, and hopefully thereafter a job.
I don't know if this will be edifying or interesting to anyone.
If you read it all and found it to be without merit, I didn't force you to read it, you loser.
But where there's life there's hope. At this point I'm calling my project of getting into teaching "Operation Clark Kent".
I want to start doing substitute teaching in the fall to build up some background, make me look like a good candidate for a teaching program.
Aside from having the people skills of a rock something that also doesn't help me assimilate to the Educational community is that I am not at all cut from the psychointellectual mold that lends itself to institutional thinking, meaning that i have very little respect for authority and i dislike the notion that one's self-worth should be connected with one's identification with and performance within and institution. I dislike the values of performance and cultural conformity/assimilation that I see school promulgating; although you could certainly argue for the profoundly important practical applications of this cultivation of attitudes, you could say that if this had worked successfully on my I would likely not be the unemployed loser i am today. On the other had you might contend that I am thus explicitly because of those values and the absence of a place within them for a person like me. Perhaps it's neither here not there.
You could also say the SG is a medium whose values of open sexual expression and the development of highly individual personal aesthetics run contrary to mainstream conformist values. Lots of SG's write about having to cover tattoos and remove piercings in order to get jobs. our culture is far less tolerant of peopel who are really different than It would like to think it is. Schools play a big part is shaping cultural mores in that direction. The think about it is that it doesn't necessarily have to be that way, it's just that instutions like people who like institutions; groups like people who identify with groups, religions with people who like religion, and so forth.
Let me start again, if you've endured thus far. The ADD can get me typing off on tangential thoughts. Such things as tattoos and piercings and mohawks and sexual expression are generally looked down upon in Pedagogical, as opposed to educational, settings. What happens is that this tends to create an antithetical relationship between learning and passion, which is a profoundly insidious and toxic cultural mistake. It makes people who have a strong streak of free spiritedness feel highly alienated from teachers and then from their capitallist masters, most of whom will wish to pound them into standard molds of what comprises and acceptable person. I have reservations about getting into an educational career for this reason, but the way I see it people who want to really be themselves deserve to get a good education every bit as much as people who wish to assimilate, and it seems to me that maybe I could do some good, quietly subverting the system from the inside, not getting confrontational with it but just letting kids know that not every grownup sees unmitigated virtue in swallowing everything that their teachers and parents and churches and mass media feed them. Still another redundant way of putting it is that pedagogy is what's drilled into children to make them good citizen and viable economic production units, whereas education is largely self-inflicted in my view, a mind determines its own direction of growth.
Anyway "operation clark kent" involves the careful disguising of any personal opinions that might run contrary to the orthodoxies of such persons as may consider me for graduate school, and hopefully thereafter a job.
I don't know if this will be edifying or interesting to anyone.
If you read it all and found it to be without merit, I didn't force you to read it, you loser.
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
I sometimes waste my time with metaphysics and you waste yours with idealism about the social order:
but the way I see it people who want to really be themselves deserve to get a good education every bit as much as people who wish to assimilate
Gaurdian temperments will always outway you Idealists; and they will rigidly defend the establishments against your attemps at subversion. Artisans are too busy working for the establishment, being apathetic, partying and being generally flippant to matter to your cause. Rationals are too immersed in their own designs (some of which lend support to social heirarchy and authority-- e.g. your machiavelli, hobbes, plato, strauss, others which include mastering the institutions of domination themselves) to help you in any substantial manner, though if you can get them on your side it's still 2 against 8 on the large.
In principle I am with you-- but you are still "wasting your time".
Seriously though, I worry about my career too and finding my niche with which I can use to further some kind of "betterment" or at least maintain my principle. My electrical engineering diploma just came in the mail today and I'm still puzzling about which corporatized private tyrrany I want to work for. I'm thinking about some sort of firm which has it's business in sustainable energy, most likely photo-voltaic systems or energy-autonomous building design or something like that.
[Edited on Mar 22, 2006 4:20AM]
I disagree entirely--things are either identical or entirely distinct (and therefore original in respect to one another), there is no in-between.
This is because each person sees different similarities between things due to their own points of view. It's like two people standing in a field of boulders--certain boulders will line up from one persons point of view that won't from the other person's.
Nick's paintings are in no way identical to other products and so are as original as anything else. There is no question in my mind.