hodgepodge

I can get worked up sometimes.


I don't take criticism very well. I get defensive really quickly. It's a character flaw and I know it, but I'll be damned if there's a thing I can do about it.

I've been overworked this week. I'm primarily a middle school teacher, but lately they've had me teaching loads of elementary. This week it's been to the point where all of my prep time is spent teaching elementary school students, thus leaving me with no time to prepare for middle school. To compound this problem, this week all middle school classes are what I'll call "hodgepodge classes," meaning that they are made up of students from various levels. They're also 90 minutes, and since the students aren't from the same classes, there's no book. There's also no way of knowing who the students will be on a given day, or how many of them there will be. The point here is that if there's any kind of class that needs preparation, it's this kind of hodgepodge class. Moreover, even if I did have time to prepare for it, it would be tough to prepare for, because of all the variables. But, the Korean mindset is that since I'm a native English speaker, this is all easy for me. My English fluency somehow implies I need not prepare or put any effort into this.

But I pull it off. The only guideline I'm given for these classes is to make the "debate" classes. So I go over a topic with the kids and we discuss it and I actually manage to get each kid to give two speeches, one on the pro side and one on the con side. I consider that a job well done, all things considered.

However, today my boss came to speak to me and told me I need to make the class more fun and the kids more energetic. I don't know how, exactly, but I managed not to completely lose it right there at that moment.  First of all, instilling a Korean middle schooler with energy or enthusiasm is a task Sisyphus would find unenviable. Second, she tells me this two days after chiding me for spending the last 5 minutes of a class playing an English game.

Yet this unfair criticism gets to me. And the worst part is that I know every logical reason why this shouldn’t stress me out. I know that ultimately this is meaningless. I don’t even mean that in a “these kids aren’t going to learn anything, anyway” kind of way, and not even in a “I have no long-term loyalty to these people, I’m in a one year contract” kind of way. I mean it in the “the sun is going to explode in 5 billion years” kind of way. I know this. I have this knowledge in my brain, and I go through most of my waking hours with that thought in the front of my mind. And yet these criticisms and demands of me give me stress headaches and burrow into my chest and settle there. Someone who has had that epiphany, who logically accepts that anything he does is ultimately meaningless, shouldn’t get stressed like I do. There must be some other force behind it. 

It scares me, that I accept this knowledge, but that it hasn't liberated me. Or maybe I don't truly grasp it.

The only explanation I can think of goes back to Carl Sagan’s quote that “We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.” It’s easy to see that quote as meaning we, made up of the same stuff that everything else is, go and seek out things and find out why or how things happen, and therefore understand the universe. But I think our role could be passive. The universe, having become human, is not knowing itself by reading some facts in a book. Rather, it’s our emotions, feelings, and sentiments that inform us about the universe. For instance, the feeling that comes from the death of a loved one is what a sun flare feels like to the universe. Disappointment is a frozen ocean and excitement is Saturn’s rings. Depression describes the Oort cloud, fear is an eclipse, death is a supernova, boredom a neutron star. Relief is moonlight. This stress I feel in the back of my head is a comet being pulled apart by the gravity of its sun. Maybe emotions and feelings are stored in these natural phenomena.

I’ve wondered before if ideas and emotions and thoughts were all created in the big bang. The big bang was everything expanding. There’s nothing now that wasn’t there in the beginning in some form or another. We’re still working with the original ingredients; we can’t destroy or create new matter or energy. So if everything that can ever exist came from there, and these thoughts and ideas that I’m having now exist, then they must’ve been present, in some form, at the beginning. Every thought and feeling anyone has ever had and ever will have was there. You just grab what you can as it all swirls round.

This is one of those ones I should probably just keep to myself.