Saturday, January 06, 2007

organizing my thoughts

"Why do you seek to join Teach For America? What would make you an effective corps member?"

Hell if I know. I'm a bit preoccupied with other things, like having broken up with Rose, my grandfather's further deterioration, money and my lack thereof, the impending term and the subsequent reality of actually writing this thesis, etc. My reaction to all of these things of late, together or individually, has been "donwannatalkboutit." As such, all I can think about is a mental slurry of Recent Events.

Something tells me the Teach for America folks aren't terribly interested in an answer along the lines of "to alleviate my white guilt." That would be far too tongue-in-cheek, and likely too honest for comfort. In the honesty department, "I don't want to hide in grad school, but getting a real job is scary and hard" might not cut it either.

I do think that I would be good at teaching and I have the confidence to say so. That's step one.

Phew. Thank god that's taken care of.

The requisite "education is the key to success" rant -- I could approach it from the "raised by educators" angle rather than the "I'd better believe this because I'm a humanities major" angle. I think what intimidates me most about all of this is the professionality of the thing. A letter of intent? An essay? This is national corporation meets grad school app type stuff. At least I'm a decent writer. Four to five hundred words should not be this difficult. That, and I shouldn't have put this off until the eleventh hour.

Culinary school has seemed more like a whim lately, like something I should relegate to daydreams.

Damn it, I wish I knew something.

2 comments:

Katharine Ryan said...

Hey...I wasn't sure when you were getting back, but we should get together soon. Thesis drinking - I mean support group all the way....call me soon. I'll try to do the same

Anonymous said...

You know I love TFA, but what about MY needs??