092518 Fatigue puckers around my heart like a putrid electric black rose Also have to pee though; think about trundling like a bobcat over the clouds and hillocks between here and the bathroom Make it work, schulte; make it work 1day@aX. My skills are like thrown knives, their energy spent; come to rest, quivering still - An entropic bucket of bolts and parts in grandpa’s garage - The serrated edge of students’ expectations is this weird mix of servility and imperiousness; I’m like the black slave nanny that gets to yell at the little white children cuz it’s my job , but I come to feel a certain affection for them - After all, everything, all of this, it’s not their fault. with whom does our allegiance lie? #pdp - ourselves? like cops sticking together on the witness stand? - our students’ parents? the ones who, sort of, indirectly, pay our paychecks, and with whom we sort of, if we have kids of our own, sympathize? - our elected officials; the school board? the ones who, sort of, indirectly, pay our paychecks? - imagined simulacra of our students? our idea of who our students should be; or zombified mummies of our worst nightmare versions of the student body, lurching around in the pre-dawn, poking our motivation with fingers of fear; the reason we get up in the morning? - they’re probably doing drugs and laughing about it; cheating; just grubbing for grades as the semester draws to a close; they don’t care about Literature, for god’s sake! Only we actually *care* about stuff, cuz we’re from back then, when school was this or that and there was no internet and blah blah blah. They have a moral and intellectual poverty that it is our duty not to enrich but to deride, to take advantage of in order to maintain our position of authority, because that authority is all we’ve got. We know in the honest arena of actual fact, motivation, innovation, and ingenuity, we’d be mostly useless most of the time, so we have to keep reinventing nightmare versions of an arcane world full of Wonderland-style obstacles, and rebranding ourselves as the only ones with the key to the map. We plant the psychic land mines and then charge dearly to guide your children through the field. Except the public is not really behind us, doesn’t trust us much more than they trust real scientists, so we can’t charge too much actual money. We have to charge in pretend respect; an almost eroticized charade of subservience. If your student plays the game wholeheartedly, if he lets us metaphorically repeatedly spit on his face and stays smiling the whole time, we’ll give him a certificate. And he’s going to need that, because college, the ACT, earnings, drugs, living on the streets, heroin, an educated populace is the bedrock of democracy, you know, all that stuff. Look it up if you don’t believe me. It’s right there on the Internet. The Internet that we didn’t have when we were a kid, and so that’s why we’re inherently stronger than you. We just watched TV all day like normal people. We know all the old jingles. All you know is stupid memes. When computers were introduced to us, they were cool. To make them do something unexpected, we had to learn some things about logic and code. Now, to make them do something unexpected, all you damn kids have to do is watch YouTube and agree to be shocked over and over again. It’s fucked up, honestly. You should really come back into our loving embrace and let us tell you how to be bored again. Really. That’s like the one thing we might really have to offer that’s actually worth a shit. - And while you’re at it, let us tell you a bunch of other shit you don’t need to know, like how to take notes in a certain format, how to annotate a text so it LOOKS like you’ve been intellectually curious about it; how to put up a two-story-tall facade of inquiry over the front of a dumpy shack full of whatever kind of rotgut and whores you got living in that dilapidated wild-west outlaw brain of yours. Get up. it’s time for school. quit dreaming and get up now, dammit. There’s a peacock in the hotel swimming pool. It can kind of talk. I took a video of it. Look.