Insight

I had this great insight the other day. Here I was, all this time, imagining that somewhere out there, there was a place - be it professional or avocational - that gathered all the interesting, positive, proactive, creative people that I had been looking for all my life. I just realized, at the suprisingly late age of 30, that this place doesn't exist! There is no place with only cool people, there is probably not many places where everyone is even motivated to be there.

I've been substitute teaching for a month now, and haven't failed to notice that the ratio of slack-ass teachers in the staff room is no different than the ratio of slack-ass students in high-school and university. or of slack-ass employees in any other job I've been fortunate enough to occupy. I had always thought, or hoped, it would be different in vocations, requiring training and having obvious disadvantages, than it was in jobs that asked for nothing more that a high school diploma. I had thought teachers would be an exceptionnal group of people, if slightly conservative than I'd like, simply by their willingness to deal on a day to day basis with demanding little animals from any number of social and family environments. I now believe that the truly dedicated teachers are quite a limited fragment of the total, and those with an actual aptitude are fewer still. The realization, let's call it a coming of age, relieves me of a lot of the pressure I had put on myself to meet excessive standards of performance at whatever I chose to do, because I'll only ever NEED to be better that the 50 crappiest percent.