thoughtgrenade.

In my experience, I’ve found that nothing quite challenges your resolve or tests your abilities in a given field quite like your second job. What I mean by that is when you find yourself in a new position or even a new profession, your first job will always have certain connotations surrounding it; it’s your starter job, the one where you learn more than you actively contribute to the whole, the one where you spend more time finding your feet than walking. Usually your employer is aware of this (which is what makes it so tricky for people to change fields since most employers do not want 70% of an employee I suppose) but I’d wager that 8 times out of 10 it ends up panning out. At least it did for me.

Your second job in the field though, you better have your head screwed on straight, your I’s dotted and your T’s crossed because THAT one hired you BECAUSE of your work at job #1 and they assume (rightfully so) that all the adjustment into your role was dealt with already. You have to be present, you have to be on the ball and you have to (at least appear to) know what the hell it is you’re doing. Remember in the first paragraph I mentioned a summer arts program for teens at a prominent university in the Boston area? This is my second summer there and, in fact, they were job #2.

Recommended by two of their staff members that I happened to work with during my first year in school, after a little bit of missed and rerouted connections, I ended up moving into my first ever dorm room in June 2010 (the position also included a residential staff portion that required me to live in the dorms with the kids as a resident advisor of sorts). This program was founded by the same man that founded my high school and many of the precepts and policies reflected what I already knew from my many years at school, so the transition into this new setting wasn’t as jarring as I expected it to be.

The jarring part was my class, or I should say my Arts Lab (the word “class” is frowned upon around these parts, and for good reason). Unlike at school, where I had a framework and some mandates as to what I had to accomplish with the kids, the program gave me a largely clean slate. Based on my history as an artist, they essentially gave me carte blanche to create a curriculum that combined Jewish and secular artistic study and lead to the kids creating a final thesis product demonstrating a connection between the two categories I just mentioned. My super ego dulled the impact of the task again, but a bit of fear and trepidation managed to creep through, especially after I decided to focus NOT on film but on my second love, sound, for this class. Looking at audio production as a whole and alternative ways of making and structuring sound, I threw together a nine session curriculum that combined audio production essentials, bible study (specifically the personal favorite story of Lot and his wife) and a healthy dose of music appreciation. If that sounds a little scattered, that’s absolutely because it was. I had faith in what I had thrown together, but all that faith did NOT guarantee that it would actually WORK.

And oh, were there setbacks. You see, students at summer jewish arts camp have so very little interest in anything resembling school. This set me on a path of great resistance from the get-go, and pretty much eliminated ideas like “starting on time” and “thinking assignments”. I realized that during the year, while students tended to enjoy my class and the work we did, they had the added impetus of institutional pressure forcing them to succeed (or at least try to). That summer, there were no grades, no institutional pressure and no realistic consequence if they did not get anything done except for ME looking bad. I was taming a new lion, and all I had were my wits, my experience and my music collection to make it lie down and roll over.

Or so I thought.

I had one more crucial weapon in my arsenal: the kids themselves. Or rather, their innate curiosity and willingness to hear someone out that they deemed legitimate. If I had gotten up there and thrown the “class” word around or gave them extra assignments or penalized them for this, that and the other thing, I would have lost them entirely. Besides, none of those things was the point. This program was guided by an idea that combined exploration and personal discovery was paramount in the education it provided, so by projecting myself as someone with knowledge that wanted to share said knowledge and framed it in a way that I felt a connection to (music and sound), these kids saw something they themselves could connect with, and thus I tricked them into learning something. The kids that rewrote the story of Lot into a modern day tale set in Tijuana wherein Lot’s wife is shot in the head by drug lords rather than turned into a pillar of salt by the power of our Lord was creative adaptation and active modernization. The kids that wrote and performed a hip-hop song about their connections to Judaism was cross-cultural analysis and augmentation, all things that had been present on my initial pitch for the class. By boiling down these ideas into the bare essential elements and presenting them in a way that was familiar and welcoming, I defined education in a way I never thought it COULD be defined, let alone by me.

However, there was one singular moment that summer that I go back to when I doubt my abilities as an educator. There was a girl in my Arts Lab that desperately wanted to record a piano piece to accompany a beautiful set of lyrics she had written with her partner. To say the least, the recording process ran into problems. Trying to get a completely live cut of this song was just not possible for this girl, she kept psyching herself out and over-analyzing everything about her style until she herself felt inadequate to perform the song SHE WROTE. She was breaking down in a really obvious way, even with the entire room empty except for her, the piano and me running the laptop. Despite never having to deal with a situation like this before, I almost instinctively sat down with her on the bench and said “Look, I know this is hard. My first recording session was unbearable and even now I’m not the biggest fan of them, but NO ONE in the entire world can play this song better than you can. And that’s a fact.”

What followed was an (almost) perfect (but good enough) take of the song, enough to throw the track together and present it. It was also around that point that the noted tremble in my voice when I said things like “I’m a teacher” disappeared. However, the fulfillment and confirmation did not end there. Sometimes life sends you messages that you are on the right track and sometimes it beats you over the head with them. In this case, watching me teach ended up becoming a major catalyst for what would evolve into a relationship with the girl I plan to marry. Results = undeniable.

I had my heading now, and I had the proof that I could get where I was going. The next step would be charting my voyage, but that would not come until later.

End Part 3

“Oh. That’s strange.” “What?” “It looks like…you’re already in the system?” “Oh. Nobody told you, huh? Funny story…”

The following exchange happened about five minutes after I first set foot into school wearing my new identity (along with my traditional blue plaid and chuck tailors) when I sat down to get my picture taken for my shiny but familiar staff ID card.

The most common question I got over those first few months (and still get, to be honest) was “Is it awkward to come teach where you went to high school?” And the answer was (and still is) “no”. I’d imagine that, for some, my choice to go back to that school could be viewed a lot like a multiple choice question:

“Q. Josh going back to teach at his high school is…

A. Pathetic                B. Naive              C. Nerdy              D. All of the Above

The truth of the matter is that I had a really great high school experience, and reflecting on it throughout college made me realize just how important it is that my alma matter (to clarify, it is a private Jewish day school) exist. On top of that, there had not been a film teacher since the man who taught me left. If there was ever a time to pull a self-constructed sense of honor and duty out of my ass, now was the time. In other words, I was just bullheaded enough to forget how awkward it SHOULD have been. Massive Task + Massive Ego = Equilibrium.

Another thing my bullheaded nature prevented me from comprehending (or protected me from realizing, one of the two) was why I was even there in the first place. I mean, sure, on a basic level I was there because a former teacher saw some kind of potential in me and got the school to offer me enough of a meager salary to get me out of Montreal, but in terms of strict sense qualifications I didn’t have a lot going for me. I had just graduated with a degree in Communications with a GPA (slightly) lower than REDACTED. I had never taken an education class in my life, and the only experience I had that could even remotely help me was two summers as a camp counselor and sixteen years of institutionalized education. Contrary to popular belief, that actually IS enough to get you going, for a while anyway.

The fact that I could fumble my way through a few months of classes wasn’t enough to QUITE convince me that I had any right to be there though. Those first few months, once my post-summer haze wore off, were harrowing to say the least. Throughout faculty meetings and interim comments and report cards and parent/teacher conferences (stunning that they’d even want to talk to the film teacher right?) I was periodically terrified that I would be found out. That someone would realize I didn’t actually know what I was doing, that I was some kind of fraud playing at having bigger britches than I did. Somehow, that point never came, and I even ended up surprising some people (most notably myself) with the work I did. Kids were learning from me, both inside and outside of the classroom, and what little knowledge (or so I thought) I had amassed in 23 years was actually making a difference on a scale larger than non-existent.

It was around this time that a band I loved released a record that I liked. On the last track of this record, the chorus was one very pointed line that helped me define my current existence: “What God doesn’t give to you, you’ve got to go and get for yourself.” Simply stated for maximum impact, it gave me the clarity and sense of purpose I had lacked over the preceding few months by denying the intrinsic need for both. I was a teacher because I wanted to be, I didn’t suck at it, and that was enough.

And it was.

End Part 2 

My penchant for monologuing and borderline organizational disorder both prevent me from not writing some kind of precursor to this, so here is my flimsy justification for what you’re about to read.

For the last four weeks, I’ve worked as a Community Educator at an Arts Summer Program at a well known university in the Boston area. Part of my work includes a healthy dose of specified professional development designed to create time for us to reflect on our educational practices in order to hone and enhance our abilities as educators. In other words, we’ve spent time studying ourselves (slightly narcissistically on my part, but I’ve always maintained that a functional bit of narcissism is an okay thing.) On top of this, a few weeks back we had guest writer come in named Larry Smith, who pioneers the Six Word Memoir Project (more info here), which amongst other things exists to spread ideas related to self reflection, documentation and personal selfworth. Both of these factors were fundamental in bringing me back to wordpress for this post, because despite the fact that I spend so much time focusing on the IDEA of reflection, I very rarely do it in any tangible way.

Reflexivity is a touchy subject for some adults, most notably the kind of adult I never expected to be. When I was younger, it was almost comical how quickly I would reminisce on events that had just happened. My desire to make every little thing significant and worthy of a good chronicling tended to grind the gears of those close to me, which combined with the legitimately loaded schedule I found myself with once I started college is probably why I engaged less and less with the idea of reflecting on my life. Living in the moment became the name of the game and in many ways it still is. However what I have come to realize lately is that thoughtful reflection and living in (and often FOR) the moment are not mutually exclusive ideas and indeed that they enhance each other a lot more than they detract FROM each other.

Another motivator of this piece is the life I’ve lead over the last two years that I have yet to adequately reflect on, in any way really. Which is pretty absurd given the literally life changing events that took place during that time. Given all the immense changes in my life and the perspective shifts and ongoing questions present as a result of them, I’ve pretty damn well avoided thinking about them in any deep way, and that is undeniably problematic. Don’t mistake my intentions though, I’m not doing this to gain clarity. My life path is clearer now than its ever been. Consider this more like giving the devil his due.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Anyway, here’s what I’ve got.

This stage of my life can be traced back to an email I received in April 2009 from a former high school teacher I had kept in contact with and had met up with a few weeks prior. In this one line email I was offered a job teaching film at my old high school, four days after I officially completed my BA. Prior to this, I had given SOME thought to going into education, but nothing substantial. Truth be told, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and an only basic idea that I was nearing the time when I had to figure that out. I wasn’t quite aimless since I had ideas, but I was a lot like a sailboat in a the middle of the desert and lacked any kind of momentum in any direction. I had a good life, friends, a purpose beyond just being a student but I’d be hard pressed to say it was going anywhere quickly. So when I got the offer I had a choice to make: stand still or keep moving. With much love and respect for the life I had, I chose to keep moving for no other reason than I believed with all my heart that if I didn’t see where that road lead then I would regret it for the rest of my life.

From that point on, life started to move a lot more quickly. I needed a new wardrobe, needed to build a new routine and adapt who I was into something a little (but not completely) more presentable and more importantly I had to give up the idea that everything I needed to know would be given to me. For all of my radical, faux-intellectual blah blah, I had become pretty damn dependent on being told what to do by some established system or another. Like it or not, what I thought and more importantly what I said would start to actually matter and would be taken seriously because of my position. While I had often taken pride in the things I thought and the high level of thought I perceived myself to engage in, I had never really considered the idea that someone would eventually HAVE to value what I said in some way. In other words, my days as a wallflower were over. I was an educator now. Whatever that meant.

It would be a while before I believed that myself.

End Part 1