i'd forgotten about this odd week until i was in it, and now there's nothing to do but sit here stumped on a friday night, treed once again by this wild dog, Work.

yesterday afternoon and last night carmel hosted parent-teacher conferences wherein teacher sits in classroom and welcomes a nearly uninterrupted stream of parents for brief discussion of their various offspring's academic progress. this was a good and useful thing ... but wearisome. by evening's end i had met with 49 sets of parents.

then today bleary-eyed faculty met for an in-service session centered upon the whiz-bang declamations of one harry wong on several characteristics of effective teachers. (i am, as best i could judge, mildly ineffective or marginally effective - depending on how you want to slice it. this set off an old tom rush tune in my brain. you know - that one where he moans "please don't remind me of my failures; i've not forgotten them." but that's ok - harry's on my side.) an incipient headache gained strength from the next brief session concerning our very own illinois state teacher re-certification process of doom - ISTRPOD to you. you would not believe the anger that this bureaucratic bullhorsecowcatandogshit stirs within my habitually placid breast.

headache kicked in and carted me into the afternoon's english department meeting wherein the group tried to accomodate certain questions regarding our north central association school improvement plan. i had nothing to say because me and my headache were pretty busy surrendering to demons of low self-esteem provoked by mr. wong and my own invidious self-comparisons to the excellently effective teacherly talents of my colleagues. i stumbled home and slept fitfully for an hour with debussy's la mer on the headphones (which was not so restful as it may sound).

headache in retreat, ate some nice spaghetti for dinner, begged off "cultural enrichment" with jay ("papers to process" ... no lie). processed fewer papers than desired, brushed the cat, read a mighty cool kids book (david almond's skellig), and sat to type to you ... whoever you are. tomorrow smells like a day for ape papers. sunday is carmel's open house for which i will don my tour guide hat. so. what stands as a four-day weekend for my scholars is really a next-to-no-day weekend for the teach. but i am not complaining because we all know that if it weren't for this work that i do (and love) i would have no life at all but to munch the spiders and flies of my own glorious impetuous nothingness.

It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world's total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.

Barbara Ehrenreich