New Kid on the Hallway

History is a curse

It is really hard to make decisions about summer employment with the specters of all my academic employment experiences hanging over me. I cannot see what's going on except through a lens of "how employment works" that has been entirely distorted by the academic market. And through that lens, each of my choices is doomed, no matter what I pick.

A summer internship should NOT be so stressful.

I don't really like interview-me very much

Interview-me is:

polite
well-dressed
alert
kind
charming
grateful
articulate
appropriately self-deprecating
appropriately self-promoting
mildly witty
thoughtful
ready with all the answers
able to say what people want to hear
likely to give people inflated expectations

Interview-me is totally fake. She doesn't really exist.

Sometimes it would be nice to be hired as real-me, not interview-me.

ETA: This is not me saying that I actually AM any of the things above. But I'm pretty good at faking them for 20-30 minutes. I can make myself into what almost anyone wants for 30 minutes - and after it feels soooooo fake...

Good thing I bought a suit

Because it looks like I am going to have interviews for summer jobs* on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this week.

(I wish I had something more interesting to wear under my suit - the shirts I own that work are very boring - but at least boring is preferable to dork.)

I have to confess to freaking out somewhat, mostly because, legal interviews! eek! never done this before! But it's also because academic interviews from which one will be hired are such long, drawn-out ordeals, that I think part of me thinks I'm going to three campus interviews this week (which would be less than pleasant).

The other thing that's weird is that I don't really have any idea how to react to this. I mean, on the one hand, I am very pleased - they're all interesting positions in which I think I could learn a lot. But I have no idea what getting these interviews means: I have no idea how many people applied for these jobs, or how many are being interviewed. (Two of the interviewers got back to me within 24 hours of getting my application - which is so mind-blowing to me, conditioned by the academic cycle, that I can't help but assume that they're interviewing anyone who applies.) I'm excited, but have no idea how to compose myself, mentally, about the whole thing.

I will say that something that's bothered me about the job application/interview process is that (ironically) it feels more competitive than the academic market, not less. The thing is, in your first year in law school, your entire class does EVERYTHING together. You take the same classes, you complete the same assignments - which kind of drives me nuts; on the one hand, yes, we bond in shared misery, but on the other, nothing makes me crazier than sitting in the cafeteria at school listening to groups around me discuss the current assignment (I should point out that this is purely because of my own weirdness, not that my classmates are in anyway acting inappropriately) - and, it feels like, we apply for all the same jobs. I'm sure we're not actually all applying for the same stuff; I'm not applying for any firm jobs, for instance, and I'm sure lots of my classmates are. But it still feels like we're all going after the same limited pool of stuff.

Now, I knew, of course, when I applied for medieval history jobs, that there were ~100-150 other applicants. But I only ever knew a tiny number of those personally, and I've realized that not knowing who my competitors were was a lot more comfortable than wondering who, sitting in class with me, has also thrown their hat into the ring with mine. I am a deeply envious person, and the less I know about my competitors, the better.

So, yeah. A busy week, and I got three and a half hours of sleep last night (but my trial brief is done! and turned in! slightly late, because there was a veritable traffic jam at the library printer this morning, which made me realize that oh my god, I am one of those students I hate! which I will post more about in the future, I think). So before I topple off to bed, any words of advice on non-academic interviews?

*where job = I get to work and they get to not pay me. To which I attribute most of my success: in this economy, who WOULDN'T want free summer labor?

Another Saturday night, and I don't got no trial brief finished

That's what I'm supposed to be doing right now - writing a trial brief. It's actually kind of fun - I have discovered that what I like about advocacy writing (in contrast to academic writing) is that I don't have to come up with my own argument! Instead, I get given an argument and have to figure out how best to support it. That's kind of a nice change from struggling to articulate exactly what's of interest and worth in a mass of data and observations. But I need a bit of a break. So I thought I'd stop by here to report on a few things:

1. I got my hair cut today and I think I've FINALLY found "my" salon. I've bounced around from place to place here, and the last place was fine, but nothing special. Today I went to an Aveda place that is not just a salon, but a training center as well. You can get uber-cheap haircuts/etc. from the trainees, or you can pay more and get the people who've done the training/train others. I went with the latter. The trainer section of the (large) salon is MUCH nicer than the trainee section. (Yes, I am swayed by aesthetics - getting my hair cut is supposed to be a luxury.) My favorite salon ever before this was a big Aveda salon in one of the first cities to have Aveda stuff in the U.S., and this one is very like it.
   
   And the haircut is very good. So that made me happy.
      
2. After lunch today, NLLDH and I passed a brand new cupcake shop. So we got cupcakes. Those cupcakes were SO. GOOD. Oh my god, we have to go back there. OFTEN.
     
3. I have an interview for a summer internship (I'm not sure there was any short-list, or whether they're just interviewing everyone), which is very nice in itself, but what ridiculously pleased me about this was that the e-mail arranging the interview addressed me as "Dr. Hallway." I was just kind of touched that they noticed and made the effort to use the title. (As well as kind of embarrassed, because I totally don't use "Dr." at ALL around school. I mean, sure, I have a Ph.D., and yes, I'm proud of it, but it's not in law, so why should anyone at school care?? Plus, my current city is a pretty casual place, so who goes by titles anyway? But still, I got a kick out of it. Kind of like how I noticed whether law schools I applied to addressed things to me as Ms. or Dr...)

Okay, I can't come up with anything else, so I guess that means I have to get back to my brief...

I don't really want to think about what this "means"

I know that other people's dreams aren't usually as interesting to others as they are to the dreamer, but I have to tell you all about the AWFUL dream I had last night, because it upset me so much:

NLLDH and I had returned to Rural Utopia, I think because NLLDH got a job there. I was given teaching because of his job, and the first day was a nightmare - I was running late, the students were annoyed, and the students were all VERY MUCH LIKE the students at Former College (many of whom were lovely, but in the aggregate, were less fun to deal with than Rural Utopia's students). And I was darting around the classroom, trying to get everything under control, but the students were sullen and unresponsive and even talking back.

Anyway, suddenly one of my dear friends from Rural Utopia - someone who really supported my teaching and who wrote me a letter of recommendation when I applied to Former College - appeared. She was now the division chair and she was supposed to observe me, since I was newly hired.

And she was appalled at how bad my teaching was. Appalled. She was so horrified, she cancelled class, sent the students home, and then told me that it had gone so badly that I could no longer teach the class. "New Kid," she said, "that was just SO. BAD. How could you not tell??" She told me they'd find me something office-related to do so I could still have a job, but that they couldn't have me teach.

And then I woke up.

I was so ashamed.

  

(NLLDH contends that I dreamed this because I found out I got an interview for a summer job thing. I contend that I dreamed this because I spent ~2 hours on the phone with my friend who was recently denied tenure at hir own teaching-based school. Your thoughts?)

Cruelest month?

Is it just me, or is everything just going straight to hell right around now?

I mean, on a macro scale, obviously the economy is horrific. And if you live in the northern half of this country, the weather this time of year is usually pretty dreary (though I have to exempt myself from most of that misery).

But on a micro scale, it seems like everywhere I go, people are sniping at each other. Two discussion boards I frequent are overwhelmed with cranky arguments. My classmates (and I) are tired and anxious, and one group of students has recently raised two semi-contentious issues in a way that seems to do nothing but antagonize people. And if the pair next to me in the coffeeshop don't stop reading their writing to each other (in carrying voices) I think I will strangle them.

Have I just fallen into a local vortex, or are others suffering this way?

In a bad economy, job prospects suck everywhere

That said, I think I bring a warped perspective to discussions about the employment prospects in law.

(Disclaimer: I don't know much about the legal job market yet, not compared to the academic job market, so my comments here are just gut reactions, not reasoned arguments.)

Big law firms are bleeding as hard as many other industries, and last Thursday has been dubbed "Black Thursday" because over 700 lawyers at big firms were laid off; 400 more lost their jobs the next day. And while I don't want to work at a big law firm (or possibly any law firm), I still have to pay attention, because when these lawyers can't find jobs at other firms, they'll turn to the government and public interest jobs I have my eye on. Plus, government and public interest positions aren't exactly handed out like candy in times of economic crisis.

Nonetheless, it's very weird for me to see someone on a law board I read talk about law prospects prior to the current disaster and criticize them as bad even before our economy went to hell.

This article talks about a reported employment rate among 2007 law grads of 92%.

Now, this is troublesome because schools are notorious for reporting ANY employment as employment - so if a law grad is working at Starbucks, hey! they're employed! Moreover, these percentages are based on students' self-reporting, and presumably those who are un- or under-employed are less likely to respond than those happily set with legal employment.

Nonetheless, the idea was floated at this other board that a 92% employment rate wasn't very good, and that, well, it made me laugh. Or cry. When you consider that most people I've seen now concede that maybe 50% of humanities Ph.D.s will get a tenure-track job (and I'd argue that number should probably be lower), 92% sounds like PERFECTION. 80% would sound like perfection. And 70% would sound pretty decent. I mean, maybe there really is 42% worth of wiggle room/exaggeration in the reporting of law grads' employment. But I'd be a little surprised if it were THAT high.

The other major issue with legal employment is an extreme bi-modality (is that a word?) of salaries. Associates - meaning new law grads - at the biggest of BigLaw firms do earn $160K+. (I'll pause while my academic compadres recover from that one.) Of course, firms offer a wide range of salaries, and only a very small number of people will reach such heights. Nonetheless, the article linked above states that the median salary for law grads working at firms is $108K.

The thing is, there are salaries clustered at the top of the scale, and salaries clustered at the bottom of the scale, but very little in the middle. And the same article warns that 38% of law grads are earning $55K or less.

And all I can think is, I would be willing to bet you that there are a LOT of assistant professors throughout this country who still start at less than $55K. (We won't even get into adjuncts, who are, after all, employed in the field for which they trained, and who would therefore be considered successfully employed by legal standards.)

This is NOT to say that there are therefore no problems with the legal job market. In some respects, it shares the same problems as academia: There are very very few of the jobs for which the degree ostensibly prepares you, which grad schools use to lure you in (in law, the money-making Big Law jobs; in academia, tenure-track jobs), and if you don't get one of those jobs, you're stuck chasing crumbs. (And, I'd argue, that once you get one of the holy grail jobs, you may well find out it's not all it's cracked up to be...but that's another issue.)

The comparison only goes so far, of course. The first big difference is that while I think the BigLaw jobs are what draw a lot of people to law school (I will go to BigLaw and wield power and make lots and lots of money!), there is a much wider range of good, accepted options other than BigLaw for lawyers, compared to options other than tenure-track jobs for academics. I don't actually think that if you don't do BigLaw, you're chasing crumbs, though I think that attitude exists (not where I am - in fact, I don't think my own school actually pushes the BigLaw track very much at all - there's a much greater emphasis on government and public interest work (though this may just be my own bias showing). But I hear this may be the case at some schools).

And the second big difference (or it should be a big difference) is debt. I sincerely hope that most people going through a Ph.D. program in the humanities are being paid to do so (even though I recognize that this won't always keep you out of debt; grad stipends don't go far, especially after you've been living on them for seven years or so already...). I sincerely hope that many people get out of their Ph.D. programs with minimal debt.

This is not the case for most people going to law school. With some private law schools breaking the $40K/year tuition barrier, law school is EXPENSIVE, and many people come out with crazy debt.

So the bi-modal salary distribution is a big problem for law students because if you come out of law school owing $150K in student loans, taking a $35K/year job to start may not be an option. If you choose to take out exorbitant loans to go to law school banking on the chance of getting one of the $160K jobs, being unable to find a job that you can afford to take can make the legal market look like one great big scam - kind of like coming out of academia and being unable to get anything more than a couple of sections of Western Civ at $1500 a throw.

But it's still hard for me to see the legal job market as quite so exploitative and awful as the academic market. This is probably due to a lot of personal factors rather than any wonderfulness on the part of the legal profession: I just wouldn't have paid $40K/year tuition, I'm going to a state school specifically to keep my tuition and loans down, I have a supportive husband who can pay our living expenses which further reduces my loan burden, and I don't want to work in a big firm anyway. And I haven't yet been kicked around by the legal job market - it may yet happen, but it hasn't yet.

It still doesn't sound as bad as academia.

Because I continue to be very, very tired

I'm still recovering from the business of the weekend (it probably didn't help that I had a piece of espresso-chocolate cake last night after dinner; it was delicious, and I crashed at 8:30, then sprang wide-awake at 11:45 and lay in bed unable to sleep for a couple of hours). So I think all I can manage is a meme:

Where I was when....

1.) Challenger space shuttle exploded (1986): My high school chemistry class. We were actually having a study hall that day (no idea why), and one kid, one of the class clowns, was listening to a transistor radio with one earpiece (hey, I'm old, technology was simpler back then). He heard the news and announced it to us and the teacher didn't believe him, so the teacher rolled a big old TV into the room to check. Its visual was nothing but snow, but we could hear the news. When the bell rang, everyone was walking through the hallways wondering how that could have happened.

2.) Berlin Wall falls down (1989): I don't remember this as one moment. I did know, though (without looking at the date), that it was 1989, because I was on a study-abroad program in England, and some of the people in my program went to Germany over Christmas break and bought pieces of the wall to take home.

3.) Oklahoma City federal building bombing (1995): In the first grad-school apartment I shared with NLLDH. I think I was wearing a white sweater and a navy skirt. (Don't ask why I remember that.) When the talking-heads on TV were speculating wildly that the bombers were radical Islamic terrorists, NLLDH turned to me and said, "That's bullshit. This is totally home-grown."

4.) OJ Verdict (1995): I have no memory of this at all.

5.) Princess Diana dies (1997): I do remember this; I woke up one Sunday morning (August, right?), went out of my apartment for whatever reason, and saw the headline on my neighbor-across-the-hall's newspaper, lying in front of her door. I was surprised by how upset I was about this. But I am English, so I have some excuse.

6.) Columbine massacre (1999): Embarrassingly, I remember the massacre, of course, but I have no idea where I was when I first heard about it.

7.) JFK Jr. Plane crash (1999): Don't remember hearing about this, either, though I know I was slightly saddened by it (I think I'm perhaps more horrified to realize it's been 10 years since this happened!). I grew up in Massachusetts as a Kennedy fan. I didn't think JFK Jr. was any kind of great white hope or anything, but we Bay Staters feel protective of our Kennedys. (Unless, of course, you loathe them.)

8.) Bush/Gore crazy election (2000): I don't remember this, either. It was my first semester at Rural Utopia and I was a little crazy-busy. I mean, obviously I remember that it happened, but it didn't leave a big impression on me. I think this is because I wasn't especially surprised.

9.) September 11, (2001): I know I've told this story before, but: I was in the living room of our house in Rural Utopia. Sound traveled up from the basement, directly below, in an amazing way. NLLDH was on the treadmill we had in the basement in front of a TV, and I could hear the noise of the TV, then he yelled up to me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center and I should on turn the living-room TV. I did, fully convinced he was describing a tragic accident, in time to see the second plane hit. NLLDH came back upstairs and we sat and watched terrible things unfold across that clear blue autumn sky.

10.) Space ship Columbia disintegrates (2003): Was this a Sunday? I remember hearing about it, and I remember hearing about the horror of bits of space ship, and, sadly, astronauts, raining down on Texas (I think?).

11.) Hurricane Katrina hits (2005): I'm not sure exactly when I knew how badly the storm had hit Louisiana; I remember the general time-frame, though, because the tail end of Katrina made it through Former College City, and knocked out the power on campus. I got to campus early, couldn't get into my building, and sat in my car waiting for them to decide what to do about classes. Went to my first class in the dark, humid building, decided that I really was NOT going to hold class in an un-air-conditioned room in the south in August, and was relieved to hear that the school gave up and canceled for the day. (Former College was in an elegant residential neighborhood, which lost power constantly because it had old, above-ground wires. My cookie-cutter neighborhood built sometime after 1989 never lost power, yay!) I also had students who would come up to me at the start of class and say things like, "I might have to leave class early - I'm waiting to hear from my family in New Orleans."

The mock trial's lessons

My campus is hosting an inter-school mock trial competition this weekend, and I took part as a witness for one of the two-attorney teams. Given that I've never actually even attended a trial before (except maybe once as a kid, on one of those "let's show kids how the justice system works and show them the jail" kinds of field trips), I figured that being a witness would be good way to learn about mock trial without requiring all the substantial work that it would take to be an attorney (since, as a 1L, I pretty much don't know anything yet about how a trial actually works). I was lucky enough to be part of a really good team, who moved on to the quarterfinals today, but unfortunately didn't proceed further. (While they'd have loved to have won, and I'd have loved to have helped them win, everyone involved in this is so wiped out that we were all relieved to be able to go home!)

Personally, I feel good about how I did - my team was pleased with me, and two of the judges today complimented me as an excellent witness. Not that I was an especially important part of the affair - the success or failure of the team depends on the attorneys, not the witnesses - but it was nice to think that I didn't make my team's job harder.

And it was an extremely educational experience. Here are some of the things I learned (remember, as a witness, not attorney):

• I expect the opposing side to be forthright and direct, and to address legitimate weaknesses in my case, rather than to rely on silly little tricks and games.
      
• Emotionally, there are no legitimate weaknesses in my case, and someone who tries to manufacture them is mean.
      
• I don't actually believe either of the first two, rationally, but it was surprising how strongly my gut reacts to being in those situations.
     
• If you are a six-foot-plus man with a loud voice, and your witness is a woman, you cannot loom over her and speak loudly without looking like an asshole.
     
• I really enjoyed thwarting opposing counsel on cross and making them look like assholes (see above).
      
• I had underestimated the degree to which drama and blatant appeals to the jury's emotions would come into play. This, I think, is the academic in me: you can't exactly make an emotional appeal about, say, the development of a particular social practice. You don't convince an academic audience because your argument is more emotionally appealing than the others - because your argument is nicer, kinder, gentler (or that the other argument is mistaken, incompetent, and kicks dogs for fun). But that's a huge part of how you convince your audience in court.
     
• Less is more in a way that is completely unfamiliar to academics, who persuade by hitting their audience over the head with their arguments and bombarding it with every fact that exists in the universe that supports their points. An accepted and effective way to criticize an academic argument is to identify what it left out, what it failed to address. At trial, you want to leave things out or not address things - and I don't mean just suppressing evidence that doesn't help your side. Rather, if you keep hammering your point home with yet another question, you are going to alienate the jury - you have to know exactly when to stop. And just because the other side makes hay of particular facts, if they aren't necessary to your theory of the case, you don't need to counter them just for the sake of proving the other side wrong. 
      
• Judges like and dislike completely contrary things, and may also have completely contradictory interpretations of the rules. (At least, in a mock trial setting, where "judges" are actually attorneys. But I don't get this sense this is limited only to mock trial...)
  

• I suspect that I would enjoy litigation, but that I would enjoy more, and be much better at, arguing the law in front of a judge (appellate work), than arguing the facts in front of a jury (trial work).
      

Why community colleges are not a solution for the academic job "market"

This post is inspired by the discussion going on at Dr. Crazy's (in response to this post by Sybil Vane at Bitch Ph.D., which is a response to this column in the Chronicle by Thomas Hart Benton), about advising students who want to go to grad school in the humanities. Vane and Benton ring changes on the theme of "Just say no!", while Dr. Crazy suggests that doing so perpetuates serious class inequities in academia.

I'm not actually addressing here the question of what one should say to students who think they want to go to grad school (I've weighed in at both of the above posts, if you're REALLY dying to read my comments), but responding to something that got raised in the comments to Dr. Crazy's post. I found myself leaving yet another multi-paragraph comment there, then told myself, Self, if you just post this on your blog instead, you will stop hijacking people's comments, and you will get a blog post out of it, too! So:

Good Enough Woman left a comment on Dr. Crazy's post saying, basically, why has no one mentioned community college teaching in this thread? That is, in all the discussion of the crisis of humanities Ph.D.s not being able to get jobs, why not consider teaching at a community college?

Now, I mention Good Enough Woman by name to cite her correctly, but not at all to single her out or criticize her for asking this question - because this is a question I see raised quite regularly in job market discussions. But finally, after seeing it any number of times, I think I can articulate some of my problems with the question, legitimate though it is. To me, the suggestion that humanities Ph.D.s would have more career options if they'd just put aside their prejudices and work at a community college doesn't really wash. (Again, apologies to Good Enough Woman for putting words in her mouth.)

The obvious reason for this is that many Ph.D.s don't want to work at community colleges. Which is admittedly true, for good or bad reasons. But let's examine the reasons why people who have earned doctorates don't want to work at community colleges.

First, I'd contend that many humanities Ph.D.s get taught that working at a community college is just as much a failure as leaving academia altogether (not that either of those things actually are failures, just that there is a zeitgeist in academia that holds that they are). I mean, I'll go out on a limb and suggest that the majority of humanities professors who staff Ph.D.-granting departments have never attended or taught a community college (I know this overlooks many people who have, especially in more recent generations, and I don't want to erase their experiences, but I suspect that in the humanities, they're still  a minority).

So you have snobbery. But beyond snobbery, this also means that Ph.D.-granting humanities departments are staffed mostly with people who probably don't know squat about what community colleges need in their faculty or how to help students learn these things. I'd even say that most Ph.D. programs probably don't do much of anything to prepare people for teaching in CCs, because what the Ph.D. programs value - research, research, and more research - is not usually what CCs need. So you can teach a seminar on seventeenth-century Italian graveyards? Gee. That's nice. Which is not meant to suggest that no one who teaches at a community college ever teaches specialized topics in their areas of research, but come on - what community colleges in the aggregate need from their humanities faculty is the ability to teach (depending on your field) composition, US Survey, Western Civ, Intro to Poli Sci, and the like. These are not the primary interests of most Ph.D.-granting departments. (WIth the exception of composition, if your Ph.D. is actually in composition/rhetoric, I suppose! And even then, doing scholarship in composition is not the same as teaching remedial and intro comp to first-year students.)

So when people say, Why don't people with humanities Ph.D.s teach at community colleges?, they underestimate the degree to which the training in Ph.D. programs is not designed to and in practice does not prepare students to be candidates for community college jobs.

Anecdotally, many of the people I know with doctorates who have applied to community college jobs have had absolutely no luck. These weren't people who were deigning to apply to community colleges and believed the colleges would be lucky to get them; these people would have considered themselves very lucky to get the jobs for which they were applying. But they had no previous experience with community colleges. And they got nowhere. I have seen this happen any number of times, to bright, lovely people who are dedicated teachers and would be extremely effective community college professors.

Conversely, everyone I know who has ended up getting a full-time community college job has had previous experience teaching part-time at a community college, often the very college at which they end up employed full-time. Sometimes they got this experience while writing their dissertations; others were able to swing teaching only one or maybe two classes a semester for a few semesters until something permanent became available. But they had to have that previous experience. And if they weren't able to get it during grad school - if they didn't know to consider it until they went on the market - not everyone can afford to live off the pay from one to two community college classes in a semester (even if you do something else like temp or waitress on the side).

I think my point here is that like any other relatively specialized place, community colleges want to hire people who have familiarity and experience with their missions and unique circumstances. But partly because of snobbery and partly because of inability, most Ph.D. programs in the humanities do not position you to get this experience. If you've gone to a fancy SLAC and R1 Ph.D. school, you don't have the right experience from your own education. And since your fancy SLAC and Ph.D. programs probably didn't promote community colleges as a viable and desirable career option, they don't help you improve your position.

Finally, I am not trying to get anyone to weep salt tears for the graduates of elite schools because boo hoo, they didn't get to go to/work at community colleges! I mean, that's just silly. I also recognize that I'm generalizing hugely here, and that what I describe does not match every individual's experience (I'd say it characterizes the culture of academia overall, but you're welcome to dispute me on that, too).

I guess all I'm really trying to say (at way too great length) is that when Ph.D.-granting institutions notoriously train students to reproduce themselves, to be eminent scholars in R1 institutions (or at a pinch, fancy SLACs), no one should be surprised that community colleges aren't a good solution for humanities Ph.D.s who don't win the lottery of the tenure-track job. It's not because humanities Ph.D.s are snobs who have internalized academia's snooty privileging of research and prestigious names, who don't want to teach introductory courses, who think that students at community colleges are of lower caliber - or, at least, it's not only that.

It's that Ph.D. programs, left to their own devices, produce graduates who are just plain old poorly qualified to teach at community colleges. No matter how much they want to.

(I'd also argue that you could probably substitute "high school" for "community college" in the post above and it would hold true. I suspect this is less the case with the elite private high schools - of which there is not a superbountiful supply. Public schools offer the additional obstacle of certification: a friend of mine who teaches at a community college would very much like to get certified to teach high school. But in her state, to get her certification, she is required to take the very course in U.S. history that she now teaches. She didn't major in history as an undergrad, so never took the U.S. survey. One doctorate later, she has now taught U.S. History umpteen times. She would still have to complete the course for credit to teach high school.)

Please forgive incoherence/rambling - it has been a looooong week and I'm pretty seriously sleep-deprived...