My Sunday Feeling

It now can be revealed.  And many of you know it already.  

From the date of the last post on the blog up until the end of March I taught at Catholic High School for Boys here in Little Rock.  A member of the faculty had to take an emergency leave of absence for reasons of his health.  So one day I was looking into forming a PA and getting malpractice insurance.  The next day I was teaching American history to Juniors and Marketing to Seniors.  Although the boss told me to teach business law since I did not know the first damn thing about Marketing.  

And I'm not kidding.  The teacher went away on a Thursday and the next day I was there for real.  And that's pretty much all I did for 3 months.  I spent my evenings preparing or grading.  It was all encompassing.  I didn't write.  I didn't play music.  I hardly played golf.  

I don't want to write about the experience too much right now.  For one thing, I never had a proper exit interview.  That's for a couple of reasons.  The principal still has way too much on his plate right now.  I need to talk to him before I write about it.  For another thing, I never really exited.  I still go in for an hour or so each day to help with the small boys choir over there which is known as the Schola Cantorum or "Schola" for short.  They are doing their first concert ever next Thursday.  I am basically the tenor section.  And I help run rehearsal when the director can't make it.  So I'm kinda busy myself.

Also, I'm still sorting the entire experience out in my head and in my heart.  And I don't really know where to begin.  I can say to you out there in the audience what I say to folks that have asked me about it.  

"Teaching ain't easy. Overall it was an amazing and humbling experience.  When it was good it was really really good.  But when it was bad it was really really bad."  And when it was bad I'm sure it was, at least in part, because I wasn't much good.  That's the way I always felt about it.  On the other hand, the real teachers there could not possibly have been kinder or more tolerant even.  It was a tough situation for everybody.  For the kids especially.  

And I think I will leave it at that for now.  

So, what have I been up to since April?  Not much.  Seriously.  It took me a good month to completely decompress, for lack of a better word, even after I started going back in to help with Schola or sub for somebody.  Ot both. 

 I think that I learned that teaching high school is not a switch you can turn on or off.  And it took awhile to adjust back to my former life after being amped up all the time.  It was weird.  I was done at spring break.  I thought about my boys a lot the first week that school started back up.  And I did consider them as "my boys." I still do.  

I got to where I could hear their voices as I read their papers.  As Melissa said, "You got attached to those kids."  Yeah I did.

So shoot me.  I'm not a terribly emotional person.  But you can't turn it on and off.  At least I can't.  Which I guess means I'm not a total sociopath.  So I have that going for me.

So what now? I still practice law a little bit.  I still plan on incorporating myself in some fashion and I intend to get malpractice insurance.  People are all the time wanting me to do stuff for them.  So why not?   I don't particularly need money.  But I see a car note in my future along with continuing with the home improvement stuff I started back in January which got put on hold due to one thing or the other back then.

My young friend Lucas Murray and I have resumed playing guitar.  I'm going to start doing the Wednesday night Open Mic Night which is now at the Next Bar and Bistro due the closing of the late and greatly lamented Afterthought.  

Melissa, last time I checked, hasn't come to her senses yet and we are still together.  We spend a lot of time going to Joe's AAU basketball games.  Which is fine. Joe is a nice player and I enjoy watching the kids play.  

Resumed working out in the day which I prefer.  Resumed getting some golf in during the weekday which is nice.  More and more of my friends are starting to retire.  I look forward to meeting them for lunch or going for walks.   I like being able to do whatever the hell I want to pretty much whenever I want to again.  

And I'm going to write more including returning to this blog.  Not sure if I will post every Sunday as I have in the past.  But I will return to blogging.  And I plan to write about sports for the newspaper's blog "Blood, Dirt and Angels." That was the original plan before I became Mister Chips from Hell last January.  

Many of the kids, and some of the teachers ask me, if I am going to "come back" as it is invariably put.  That's nice to hear.  The principal told me the other night that I need to be at graduation next Friday.  "The boys will want you to be there," he said.  This comes as a surprise to me as there were 2 or 3 that I would have liked to have strangled.  And I'm sure the feeling was mutual.  But that, too, is nice to hear.  

So in addition to getting a business license, along with all the other stuff I will need to get street legal to do the lawyer thing, I'm going to look into the requirements for getting a teacher's license on a non-traditional basis.

Because like I said.  You can't turn it on and off.

We will visit again soon.