scijessreads

Sometimes, I think my internal desires manifest themselves in unexpected ways. And probably at the least easy time. But life is not meant to be easy, at least not the big stuff. That’s what I’m telling myself anyway.

I’m at a transition point in my career. Which happens to coincide with the fact that I’ve been in one spot for 6 years now, which is the longest I’ve been in one spot since high school. After that, I’ve moved on about every 4-5 years for school or jobs. And at the end of each of those tenures, I’ve had the itch that it was time for a change. That itch has been sneaking up on me over the past year, and I think finally manifested itself in a variety of ways both large and small.

In my current position, there is no noticeable way for me to move up. The machine here moves in ways that are bafflingly unproductive, yet with the assumption that more is better. I have found in my time here that I LOVE teaching. The rest of it, not so much. My interest is satiated when in the classroom or trying to see what other options are out there to help my students. Unfortunately, there are a lot of things in the way of being able to implement a lot of the ideas that come swirling to the surface.

Education, and higher education specifically, is in an interesting time. People want results, but don’t want to necessarily invest the time in at the ground level that would set the foundation for results. More money is spent on directors and admin, and less on the grassroots level of teaching. We know what is wrong, yet don’t have the ability to invest in it. Honestly, the whole first year of college should be “professional development” in the sense of establishing how to think critically, communicate effectively, and learn how to study in a way that goes beyond memorization and into learning how information overlaps and interacts with a wide array of concepts and fields of study.

All of that to say that I think I have inadvertently given myself an ultimatum to start looking for something new, that fits with my current goals of teaching first. I don’t know if I have done this on purpose, or it was actually a result of some misunderstanding on my part when turning in a big portfolio with information missing, and upon realizing said mistake, just shrugged it off and went, “I guess that happened.”

That response was key in telling me that my heart was not in this current position, and that I need to work and find one that is a better fit. For me and the students that I hope to continue being able to teach.