At present, I am faced with a sort of duality in my life. On the one hand, I want to leave behind Academia for a brief period in order to give myself a break from the tedium of lesson plans, grading, and classes; on the other, I sorely miss the pleasure and enjoyment of taking classes, being challenged by research papers, and learning new things. I enjoy teaching, but not nearly so much as learning, and I don’t feel I’ve learned much new or useful information in too long a time.

There has been a lot of debate in my mind as of late as to what I want to do in the near future. I simply cannot continue teaching low-level French if I’m not enjoying it and the students aren’t getting everything they need as a result of it. I have never misled myself to think that I would be good at teaching introductory French, but having only a Master’s, that’s the general scope of what positions I can look forward to in the future if I choose to continue in this vein. An option is, of course, to go back to school and get my PhD in French so as to teach the higher levels, but even that is not what I really want to do. Teaching French is convenient, but I am no more attached to French than I am to English, seeing both as simply languages and therefore interesting to study. Had I taken German, I would undoubtedly be teaching German right now. My interests lie in linguistics and in research. Research, I have found, is far more interesting and likable than teaching students who don’t want to learn. For every one student who is interested in the subject, there are twenty–or more–who are not. And while it pains me to feel so eccentric and snobbish, I simply do not enjoy working with people who do not like to learn. One would think that at a University there has to be some degree of enjoyment from education or else they wouldn’t be here. If it were so horrible to learn, then they wouldn’t–or couldn’t–stay. Yet here they are, adding to the misery of my existence as a lover of education to see students unwilling to even spend five minutes to scribble out their homework before class begins or who cannot comprehend the concept of studying at all.

I’m bouncing haphazardly from subject to subject, I know, but it’s difficult to focus. It has been so for a while now, and that fact alone bothers me enough to know that I have to do something in order to remove myself from this rut. And if removing myself from this rut means removing myself from teaching, then so be it. I need a change. I need to get back to what I enjoy so that I don’t fill my time with fruitless game-playing or putzing about in order to mask my mental boredom, convincing myself that I’m “doing” something when I’m really not at all. I don’t know that going back to classes is what I need either, however, and maybe I just need a change so drastic that I finally get my ambition back to do something more interesting. After all, I’m no intellectual slouch. I can do whatever I want to do. I could have been a math major or physics major or history major…just about anything, really–excepting, perhaps, chemistry and economics. I have the capacity to do just about anything I set my mind to. I just need to get my mind going again, is all. It’s awful that I need a jump start at all.

I suppose part of me feels bad that I would much rather work with books and journals than with people, but I have never been a great lover of the human race, finding the majority to be far too single-minded and inane. Having been an outcast and “freak” from kindergarten on, it’s understandable that I react to them with diffidence and in a stand-offish manner. This tendency on my part just makes me wish all the more that I had gone a profession based on research or data. While the human element would still exist (and is necessary), at least I would presumably be working with people with similar interests and a more common goal. The goals and interests involved in teaching a hundred different people includes too many ridiculous variables to be effective. I’d much rather tutor one-on-one than have twenty-five disparate people in one room. I seriously think I would be best off returning to the employ of a library where I can work on records and books in relative peace. I could also get back to my own research, which I miss sorely. I am not good with people, and in order to gain a little bit of happiness back, I feel I need to get away from them for a while or at least deal with them under wholly different circumstances. I need something; I just don’t need more people.