At the same time, the payoffs do seem huge
What payoffs?
The best one, at the college level, is one word: SABBATICAL. I have one next semester and I am so looking forward to it. I can't tell you.
Teaching is great except for grading. That's pretty much the biggest problem. I could deal with every other part of it, but the actually reading of papers, assigning them grades, and writing comments that tread the line between the swift kick in the ass advocated by kegboy, and the tiptoe through the land-mine of the suburbanite ego that I feel pressured to take.
It's heartening to hear from other students that you recognize that students are assholes, by and large. My understanding of it is that kids are pretty much trained into being assholes by the combined efforts of the Tom Greens/Howard Sterns of the media landscape brought to you by Viacom, and the distracted parents who put a TV and a media wonderland in every child's room so said parents don't have to pay much attention their satanic offspring, and, finally, in my case, by a university desperate for tuition dollars so we have to continue pamper their satanic little tushes rather than challenge them, let alone swiftly kick their abercrombie asses.
So, I mostly try to seduce them into intellectual awakening. Alas, would that I were more seductive. But some of them do awaken. Lightbulbs flash on above heads that had, heretofore, only ever produced dandruff. But most of them say, "Ummm, do I have to know this for the final?" And a few of them say, "Fuck you, bitch." |
