Nikolai's Palace

I don’t want to write about the current state of public education in US, its pitfalls, or the future overhaul by Obama’s administration. These things are contingent and flexible. I hear one thing in the news, someone says that the school system has gone to “hell” and then will utter some regurgitated cliché from two mouths past. I think to myself, when has the education system been successful at doing what it does? And what precisely is that it does? It’s aims, goals. I guess i did rant about the education system *chuckles*. The more i listen to all of the gossip about “our” dysfunctional education system the more i wonder about my position as a teacher within it. Sometimes when i am in the classroom, giving a lesson or just simply observing the breathing in-and-out of the entire body of students, i see no disruption, i see kids, just simple kids stuck in one stuffy stinky room, full of hormones, thinking about how to approach this or that girl or boy and dreading over the next quiz i am going to give them. During these moments the political and the administrative issues of out system cease to exist. They lose their meaning, thought still of course bearing that invisible effect on the entire structure. The classroom on its most microscopic level taken on its own unique and individual state, free from beurocratic regulations. I am still very doubtful about my career as a teacher. I think every teacher at some point wakes up to a cup of cold coffee and asks himself/herself “shit, this is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life”. Most likely i will die of lung cancer induced by state mandated exams and nervous irritability, maybe even i’ll just choke on a bagel or something. But then again what i say and write is only fiction, plus i can’t write anything ‘TOO” explicit, they are always observing me. The paranoia driven future educator decides to stop his education rant, rolls over on the other side of the bed and dreams about lightning striking a petri dish somewhere other than American Midwest, giving life to a new organism.  

I wake up and hear her voice. “I’m cold”.

So i get up, but not with the crabby, hangover type of feeling that i usually get when i wake up, but with a wonderfully peaceful, calm one, my motion as light as the wind that’s blowing through the window. I go to the window with the thought of her being cold and shut it close.

“Come back to bed” she says with her half-closed, rosy eye’s.I return.

Attached is a bad-ass photo of me