And so on and so forth…

Thomas O’Shaughnessy, my high-school English II teacher, died on Thursday, after two years of fighting colon cancer. I heard it through our high school’s Facebook page, which shows that social networks still serve some of their core purposes: to inform and to stay connected, rather than become detached and caught up in farming games and Bananagrams. Admittedly, it’s a bit strange to start journaling my life with this event, but for some reason it felt fitting in a Circle of Life sort of way: it is around the time of his death that my life as an educator is about to begin.

I graduated from uni past May, but even with the commencement and the celebrations, it still hadn’t felt real. Perhaps it was due to not having my diploma or transcripts (they were available for pick-up a few months later), or the fact that I hadn’t landed a teaching job. Granted, I only sought out one school (I didn’t make it past the first interview) and I just dropped off resumes in random boxes at one education fair.

With no job prospects, this summer felt like all the other ones during my undergraduate years, a sort of limbo in which my mind was free to mindlessly rot. Sleeping through the day, staying through the night, going out and playing games, this summer has been a very blissful, if unexamined, life. I kept a part-time tutoring position at my university, mostly to have money to pay off student loan interests, credit card bills, and for summer outings. Oh, and to still feel like I’m pursuing an educator’s path. Yeah…