the worst job

On Thursday I will sit with each of my students and converse with them for five minute interviews.  They call it a speaking quiz.  I gave them a list of questions I will ask from and explained there would be follow up questions to the questions on their papers.  For the morning period they read and translated and practiced asking each other the questions and I came to the grey eyed girl, with origins in Pakistan and probably roots back to a Greek henchman, and asked her a few:  “What do you think is the worst job?”  Teacher.  Teacher?  Explain.  Teaching is difficult because a teacher doesn’t connect with young people.  Since I have been her only teacher this semester I figured she was speaking from her own experience.  Well, honey, (I didn’t use that word) I don’t know how to connect with someone who can’t put away their damn i-phone without the teacher yelling at them every day.  Students are more connected with their smart ass phone because it doesn’t require any long term thinking.  Little jolts of dopamine here and there, we probably lost you a few years back. 

Right, it can be the worst job in the world. 

The director was quite unsettled (so said he) when he read my letter of resignation and while I was touched when he tried to offer any kind of counsel that could change my decision, he doesn’t have the chutzpah or money to fulfill my absurd ‘I wish I had’ list. I told him my decision was a culmination of many things personal and professional.  A personal wish list, if there was any means to keep me here, would require water, like an ocean, to swim in in the mornings or at dusk, a Chinese masseur who’d come to my grotto once a week for a massage and three times a week to cook.  The professional wish list is also too grandiose to mention here, but a stupid overhead projector would have been nice.  Someone is getting stinking rich here and I ain’t seeing any of it. 

I asked the same question to another student and heard the same disheartening answer but the young man originally from Jordan added that when I come here, I think I want to be a teacher, everyone is happy, we all laughing.  It is a Good Morning Buraimi kind of place, gentle sometimes not so gentle mocking, academic satire I will call it and is there any learning going on, for a few who are determined, yes, but on Sunday, it’s social hour, and is it disrespectful to turn your back on the teacher, this is happening from a girl in the front row for crying out loud, or is education simply not meaningful here and I am the last one to know about it.

I swear, they don’t care and it leaves me to think I shouldn’t care either.  And when I think that I know it’s time to leave.

I was gonna cross the border this evening for a meal but I think I’ll wait until tomorrow.  Monday.  I feel a steak tacos at Pacos coming on.  And a visit to the shop in the back for fermented grape medicine.    

When I leave the college nursery I get into my old car and the heat is something else for five minutes maybe more until the a/c is running full but by the time I am back at the grotto there is great fatigue and three hours later a low running headache.  A colleague suggested I sell the car now, like hell I will, standing in hell’s heat is a guarantee ticket to headaches, but I will sell it with a month to go and then will rent something from the sheister-car rental thieves unless I can come up with a better plan.

Did you know, no I didn’t give it to me, Hong Kong has a maximum age of 28 to teach on their overcrowded island.  Gee I missed that mark a bleeping generation ago.  Anything else?  No, I spent a lot of time looking at Northern Thailand, somewhere in the mountains to live and work would be ideal, a place where I could walk through the hilly woods to the school and teach a class of young people, no more than ten in the class, and then walk back to my log cabin where my meal is waiting followed by a foot massage in my hammock.  You wouldn’t be concerned about the relatively paltry salary and the tropical heat that would most definitely leave you covered in insect bites and an itchy sweaty butt crack.  Gee, since you put it that way, let’s look at Kazakhstan!!  

 It seems, it feels, I won't be visiting the mountain for some time.  I don't know where I'll head when this term finishes, I have a lot of good memories and a lot of good photos of this special place, along with a lot of special people.  My real connection, unlike my job as a teacher, was with the children, fearless, tough, and gentle like you'd expect kids to be.  I see this boy six years after I took this image on occasion, we look at each other saying 'I should know who this is' but go on.  Here's to the mountain and those who live in it.