Between the semester and the lack of internet connection I'm down to a post a week.

I've had two epiphanies today: the first is that I'm no longer calculable by internet quizzes and the second is that you cannot take for granted anything learned in the classroom.

The first, the internet quizzes, came as a surprise and maybe even with a smidge of sadness. Obviously internet quizzes don't actually tell you anything about your life, but taking one for fun today led me to realize that I no longer think like a normal human being. What I mean by that is, schooling has robbed me of the ability to respond to social prompts the way others do. Does that make sense? I don't mean it in a boastful, proud sort of way, but perhaps I do mean to imply some loss of innocence. I've known for awhile that I see things in ads and rhetoric that goes unnoticed, or at last uncommented, by most people--series of objectifications, hidden messages, and what not, but up until now I've always been able to take silly little internet quizzes and have a laugh at the results. Today, however, I took one of those "Buddhist" quizzes--one of those this tells you what your true personality is things--and it was more than just wrong; with my answers it didn't even make sense. I'm slightly bummed. I feel like school has finally beat any remaining normality out of me and I've lost my last connection to childhood ignorance. Keep in mind it was simply this quiz that prompted this awareness, but I would never say the quiz was anything but a vehicle for inspiring the discussion. I don't know that this is of any more value than my inability to read popular magazines or watch shows like E! Entertainment; I've lost the willingness to play along with all of those things, but since I never really enjoyed any of them in the first place it never seemed worth commenting on. The loss of internet personality quizzes, though; I might now be one of those people that others ask, why can't you just play along? I find it disturbing to fall into that category since I've built a life around "playing along."

The second realization is of much more consequence. I had assumed that there was significantly more retention in my classroom than there was. I was proven wrong by the most recent batch of rough drafts I graded and now only was I disheartened by what I saw, I was angry. Real, true anger; that's not something I've felt in awhile. What made me angry was the type of mistakes made: typos, formatting errors, sentences that don't say anything. These were all things we went over, at length, in class, and yet there they were, staring at me from the pages of forty papers. I'll accept my responsibility as their teacher; I should have talked more about these things even if the topic is boring, but nothing is quite so frustrating as realizing that what you thought was learned was not. I've heard other teachers complain of this and in retrospect it was only a matter of time before I experienced the same situation, but that doesn't make it much easier to handle.

I'm beginning to think I should have been a Math teacher. Now, I can't accomplish anything past calculus, and even that is sketchy, so the reality of me being a math teacher is pretty farfetched, but at least in math you have obvious, quantifiable data. There is a problem, there is a formula, and there is an answer. Some people might argue the same is true of English, but I'm inclined to disagree. I would place writing somewhere between art and science, much like philosophy and all the other "soft" sciences. This means that there are few "tricks" or shortcuts I can offer to my students. Even with music it always seems easier to explain why one must do something a certain way. Even if in music theory it is "just because" the answer rests on what we have been trained to hear. But in English...how does one teach another to think about their thinking? That is, of course, the question any number of composition theorists have asked and while I have read some excellent strategies I find the complications of the classroom, department requirements, and different student bodies has made it much more difficult to achieve than I naively thought before.

I wonder how many of these questions philosophy teachers ask, and what could be gained by appropriating techniques of teaching philosophy? No doubt that idea would anger both Philosophy and English departments, but it just seems much more connected to me than the hierarchies of school allows for.

Oh what am I saying? Even I don't know. I'm too tired to sleep. What does that say about my mental state at the moment? I'm also reading Atlas Shrugged which is incredibly interesting and I plan to talk about that sometime in the near future. Some day, when I have a real job and tenure I'm going to teach a composition class that's based around a novel we read in class. Teaching writing through reading--what a concept! It works for creative writing workshops and yet we don't pursue it in composition. Heaven forbid we recognize the similarities in all types of writing.

Oh well, none of it matters. I'm just going to be a nihilist. We don't believe in anything Lebowski!