The Pissed Off Professor

The road I traveled to teaching is a bit like the famous Frost poem.  It is perhaps the most moving poem I have ever read, and in many ways—in the important ways—it describes just who I am.

Many of the most influential people in my life are (or were) teachers.  I don’t ever remember really not liking school, so teaching was a logical career choice.

Like any career, there are things I’ve learned on-the-job that no one bothered to tell me during my “training” phase, and some of these things seem as if they  might have been, uh, important points to mention somewhere in all of the classes I took to earn the right to make my living teaching.

Absent these little tidbits of knowledge, I know look back on my traveled road and realize that the circumstances were like Frost’s poem with a few revisions:

• The “yellow wood” was a black, ominous forest.
• The undergrowth was filled with rotting corpses of the teachers who had come before me.
• There would never be time to travel another path as long as I was an English Teacher: there are far too many papers to grade.
• The path I took did make all the difference, and somewhere in the DSM IV, I am certain the difference is evaluated.

This may convince some people that my problem, my being pissed off is a result of good ol’ job dissatisfaction.  To a certain extent, I suppose I am dissatisfied, but on these pages I shall prove it is not about me but about my students and the state of education in general.