2003-10-02 - 7:08 p.m.
As school has gotten under full swing I've gotten terrible at updating. Fall is closing in, the last of the sunset fading by 7:30 pm and the temperature going from too hot to wear a jacket to nippy breezes and chilly fall weather almost over night. I was so excited to flip my calender to October as I spend most of my days wishing for time to hurry up, only so it can slow down for 10 days in November. But no matter how I recount the weeks until then, it's still a long time.
I've been drinking way too much Stumptown coffee, thinking that if we have the same chemical coursing through our veins it will some how make those 3,000 miles seem less. Headaches at 4pm seem, dehydration and jangly nerves seem like a small price to pay for this. (of course, I've been home all day with a terrible cold and my body has forced me involuntarily to take a break from coffee)
Every week I come up with a new plan for my future. A few weeks ago it was a Phd program in Cultural or American studies, now it's a masters degree program in Arts Education. The prospect of teaching is really exciting and really scary to me at the same time. I've been reading a book called The Policing of Families by Jaques Donzelot and it's all about how families became arms of the state and also the role that education plays in this. Of course, I don't need a tediously translated French theorist to tell me that schools and social work are and can be institutions that police citizens and reinforce certain values that keep people from being to critical or resisting too much. So the question for me is how to be a teacher in this kind of system that encourages students to think outside of it? This also relates to a larger question that I struggle with which is how to be a person living in this system while also resisting it? Because we can never be fully outside of practices of domination, I think, but to think about how we reinforce them and to act to undo this, that's the hard part. And for me I think teaching can be a profound step to challenge the routine socialization that goes on in schools, but I am not exactly sure how to do that yet.
