Leaving on a positive note

I am writing this at 1:30am on a school night. Sleep comes with difficulty at the moment. Despite having only 113 days left until I leave, and none of the seriously difficult events coming up, I cannot sleep.

I want to end on a positive note. The issues of this place are easy to identify: the issues of myself are easier to notice, less intractable and actually possible to deal with.

As I am in this job for 111 more days, I become more sensitive to those who say they have been abused. Have I suffered too?

What do I need my school for? A professional reference. Having just listened to a lecture on the psychology of Cain and Able, I am considering thoughts about jealousy and how we wish to destroy that which is noble in ourselves. I feel there is some nobility in work. Let me recount for you a lesson I taught yesterday.

Students came into the library both surly and unruly, with one boy repeating my desire for focus in an unduly playful way. In response I delivered an intellectual speech lasting 45 minutes without a breath that seemed to inspire thought and focus. In it I ranged from the questions of school, of why it might be so boring. Students responded and I made people think. The lesson left its mark on me if not these students.

From this story I returned to a moment in the recent past whereby one of my bosses said openly that she did not want mavericks in her department. She said, without irony, that she did not want students wanting to be taught be certain teachers. With the worst kind of socialism (ironic in a neoliberal world), she wanted to pull all teachers down to the worst levels of work expected. I look at the above. I wonder why the irksomeness of this behaviour should be so surprising to me. Surely I should be grateful that I have not met more people too procedural with work.

But what is it to treat people with respect and something better than I experience now?

II. Professionalism in work
A. What is it to treat people?
B. Expectations of how to treat other people
C. NVC and how to express
III. Critiquing via an exit interview
A. What do I really want to improve. There are distinct areas. Anything that relates to staffing... leave.

For too long the focus of my mind been insulated by work

Too much of my blog has become focused on work and machinations of lost people, or rather people lost to me. I am perhaps one of those people or at least I feel I have lost some of the most vital parts of me. Around me now are some are some who do not seem lost. 

I am reading Bear Town, a book about a crime that shakes an insular community who suffer as an economic casualty. It strikes me how a family is pressured to conform in various ways. I detest how Dubai is like this, or rather how I perceive Dubai like this. There is a sense of painful conformity in my peers that grinds in my mind, stuttering fragments of communality embed my past into dangerous shrapnel.  They shut down any conversation about people, ideals, politics, literature, love. But... they have a right to treat teaching as job and to experience full lives outside of the place. I have chosen to reap financial benefits by staying here, and so these complaints lead to one path - a visit back to my youth. 

I spent much of school-time relatively alone. I enjoyed some connection with my peers, but I know now how I was aloof. Some times I wished for a greater connection with others, of a collection of friends who would have gamed and loved and adventured with me. But mostly I just wanted to be in a realm beyond the machinations of Wolverhampton teenagers, of the typical fashions and concerns of a youth insular to me even then. I remember distinctly, and I might have mentioned this before, of one particularly irksome peer asking me if I wanted to walk with his friends. I remember saying 'no', and he responded 'well you can't anyway'. Without guile I expressed appreciation that I would rather work with myself. At this point, at 37, I consider the possibility that they actually wanted me to walk with them because the need for connection and being accepted is strong in everyone, especially young people. 

At this stage, that need for connection is strongest in me. 

Today I feel somewhat better because my reading is at a reasonably strong point. I know that over Xmas my reading dips. I become easily distracted, affected by some spectrum of ADHD. Although not right now, I whittle away my time on chess games and browsing the internet. Such reading takes me beyond the insular and vulnerable relativity that has dragged my leaderless mind for so long. 

Such reading maybe reflects a truth that is growing in me for many years: that my mind is filled with varied personas. Without a goal or guiding path, the dominant version of me will simply be the one that seeks gratification at that particular time. I imagine a kind of theatre-in-the-round, as if I am back in Scarborough. Perhaps better would be a Roman senate, ready to accept rhetorical arguments with decisive, rather than derided or divisive, conclusions. 

I am ready for a new state of mind in a new place. Like taking a spiritual drug, or to embrace a rite of passage, I seek a refocussing of my mind. A profound change. Or rather I seek to be more decisive in the goals I wish to have. And of how my mind might interact. I don't want to burn everything; just to seek a little death. 

At this time I suffer a little bit of stress with my to-do list. It dissipates somewhat when I read it. For decades I would visit the cinema, friends or distract myself. My angst is not motivated by any one thing necessarily. And it will not be one thing that will alleviate it. 

This weekend I have enjoyed a relatively successful experience of walking, being and reading. I have read for longer than I have for months.

Read now.