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I'm not a teacher, sorry. My mother taught elementary for a few decades but that was a while back... I don't know about teaching specifically, but in general the wisdom in the BFC résumé thread is that nobody cares about your grades except maybe entry level positions. And even then.
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Jan 10, 2014 23:20
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tuyop posted:Really though, it's the best part of the last semester, and not only for the fun of playing volleyball in the middle of dry lecture courses, but because it's the first thing in school I've really sucked at. It was so frustrating and dreadful to go into an evaluation knowing that despite my practice and whatever else I'd done, I'd still get a mediocre or failing mark. It was like I didn't know the language or something and it really helped give me a sense of empathy for students who don't read good or do other stuff good. Now I know I'll never run a class so that it favors students with academic or physical aptitudes in an unbalanced way if I can help it. Like, if 30% of a course is a standardized written exam, most of the other 70% will have an option for some other form of evaluation like a dance or play or debate or rap or something. What's harmful is the idea that having less aptitude is something to be ashamed of, and trying to hide these differences only makes this sensation of shame worse. The sort of class you proposes awards convincing the teacher you tried, not actual accomplishment. No Wave fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Jan 11, 2014 |
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Jan 11, 2014 00:02
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No Wave posted:You're kidding, right? If your class has a goal, ie, is trying to teach something, of course some students will have greater aptitude for it. Well, no. The goal is student engagement, I don't really give a gently caress about subject matter because if you can successfully engage a student they'll take the subject matter into their own hands intrinsically. Students are more likely to be engaged if they have a stake in determining how they're evaluated and that evaluation uses something that they feel they're good at and has some sort of purpose. I'll probably have some students who are awesome at essays and multiple choice exams, and some who are musically inclined and so on through a huge array of interests. All of those things can be leveraged to show that a student has met the outcomes of the course, and the odds of engaging a student increase as you give them more choice in how they're evaluated. Do we have to learn about WWI? You can write me an essay about something, like the consequences of a battle, or a war poet's life and impact, or you can make a video on your phone with some friends reenacting something relevant, a group can cook some of the stuff that soldiers would have eaten and talk about what that meant for their lives and the war, and so on. If I just assigned an essay or exam, I'd see a much more "normal" bell-curve of achievement and very few students would be engaged. In my volleyball class, I think I would have done much better if the "practicum" portion of the course could have been weighted similarly to the technique portion, or if there were even a few training plan assignments instead of just the one. But university is a very traditional environment and I haven't seen anything like what I'm proposing so far, even in education of all things.
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Jan 11, 2014 00:22
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I can see how that might work for history, but what about math or science? "I'm going to DANCE about polynomials!"
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Jan 11, 2014 00:30
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Cicero posted:I can see how that might work for history, but what about math or science? "I'm going to DANCE about polynomials!" I'm not going to be a science teacher, so I don't know. That's between them and their god. Nothing really changes. Your role is to engage your students, in a secondary STEM context the disciplines available to you are just narrowed a little bit. Look at Crash Course Chemistry, I did terrible in my high school chemistry class because it was all about memorizing and regurgitating valences and poo poo. If I could have been graded for making a video like Crash Course I would have learned a ton more because I would have wanted to get my poo poo right. The onus is on the teacher to do the hard work and reflection to figure out how they can trap their students into falling in love with their subjects. In chem or bio I'd be totally open to student-lead outings if they were willing to explain natural stuff in the context of the course. Or something silly like like writing and performing a play where they're roleplaying different elements or molecules. There are thousands of ways to trick students into doing the leg work, usually it's not through the same old boring experiments and lectures, though.
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Jan 11, 2014 00:59
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tuyop posted:The onus is on the teacher to do the hard work and reflection to figure out how they can trap their students into falling in love with their subjects. Tuyop, this is a kind of a misguided belief because not every kid is going to love every subject but they still need to learn them. Like, sure, you can make classes more engaging to your heart's content but you're still going to get that kid who goes "Ugh, I hate math" and will never enjoy it no matter how fun you make it.
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Jan 11, 2014 01:23
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I don't know how it is in Canada, but in the US as a teacher at a university or a public grade school you would not have that much freedom to decide how to evaluate your students. Accredited courses have to meet certain requirements and "you can just bake some WWI recipes" is not going to cut it for History 117 or whatever.
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Jan 11, 2014 01:25
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tuyop posted:Well, no. The goal is student engagement, I don't really give a gently caress about subject matter because if you can successfully engage a student they'll take the subject matter into their own hands intrinsically. Students are more likely to be engaged if they have a stake in determining how they're evaluated and that evaluation uses something that they feel they're good at and has some sort of purpose. I'll probably have some students who are awesome at essays and multiple choice exams, and some who are musically inclined and so on through a huge array of interests. All of those things can be leveraged to show that a student has met the outcomes of the course, and the odds of engaging a student increase as you give them more choice in how they're evaluated. Do we have to learn about WWI? You can write me an essay about something, like the consequences of a battle, or a war poet's life and impact, or you can make a video on your phone with some friends reenacting something relevant, a group can cook some of the stuff that soldiers would have eaten and talk about what that meant for their lives and the war, and so on. If I just assigned an essay or exam, I'd see a much more "normal" bell-curve of achievement and very few students would be engaged. But the written word in general is by far the easiest way to show that you've synthesized information. If history, roughly, is about trying to create a narrative from a collection of aggregated information, obviously one can demonstrate that through many media. But it's much easier to display that with the written word than with anything else, and reasonably someone would have to put in much, much more effort to display the same level of understanding if you're not using the written word to communicate it. I certainly encourage getting students engaged by any means possible. The current formula of telling people literature is great and then asking students why it's great even though they don't like it is completely insane. But some people, independent of medium, will have more aptitude for, even in the case of history, synthesizing disparate information into a narrative. And that's what you're testing - for the student, engagement is a means, not an end. tuyop posted:Nothing really changes. Your role is to engage your students, in a secondary STEM context the disciplines available to you are just narrowed a little bit. Look at Crash Course Chemistry, I did terrible in my high school chemistry class because it was all about memorizing and regurgitating valences and poo poo. If I could have been graded for making a video like Crash Course I would have learned a ton more because I would have wanted to get my poo poo right. The onus is on the teacher to do the hard work and reflection to figure out how they can trap their students into falling in love with their subjects. In chem or bio I'd be totally open to student-lead outings if they were willing to explain natural stuff in the context of the course. Or something silly like like writing and performing a play where they're roleplaying different elements or molecules. There are thousands of ways to trick students into doing the leg work, usually it's not through the same old boring experiments and lectures, though. The other danger with this approach is that you're allowing students to identify as not being very good at "writing", for example, instead of focusing on the fact that pretty much all skills are teachable (barring a literal physical handicap such as your volleyball example). It can't really be worse than the status quo, so it doesn't really worry me the same way your approach to child-rearing does, so whatever. No Wave fucked around with this message at 01:46 on Jan 11, 2014 |
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Jan 11, 2014 01:29
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HipGnosis posted:God this sounds way better than anything that was offered at my high school I took taxidermy twice in high school, my junior and senior years. It was my very first class of the day which was sweet because we could pretty much roll in at any time. All we had to do was mount 3 things a semester and there wasn't really a time limit other than "do 3 by the end of the semester" and if you did a lovely job, you got a B. If your mounts looked mediocre or above, you got an A. It was pretty well known by the other teachers that the taxidermy students had to go check on their birds/fish/whatever drying pretty regularly so it was also a convenient way to get out of other classes.
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Jan 11, 2014 04:39
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I have never heard of a high school(or anywhere else) teaching classes on taxidermy. That sounds pretty cool, should have made big mouth actual bass.
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Jan 11, 2014 05:07
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tuyop posted:Yeah I think this minor disqualifies me for any academic awards because I suck at it. I hope that doesn't make it much harder to find a job. It disqualifies you because you became disabled while serving your country in the military? Sounds like a job for a local news agency.
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Jan 11, 2014 14:11
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I'm really sorry for the edutalk derail for anyone who's come for personal finance talk!MrKatharsis posted:It disqualifies you because you became disabled while serving your country in the military? Sounds like a job for a local news agency. Aw, thanks, but that's a little bit dramatic. It's more like I was hurt on the job and thought I could still get the qualifications to be a gym teacher but sports hurt so I do badly on the courses. Leperflesh posted:I don't know how it is in Canada, but in the US as a teacher at a university or a public grade school you would not have that much freedom to decide how to evaluate your students. Accredited courses have to meet certain requirements and "you can just bake some WWI recipes" is not going to cut it for History 117 or whatever. It depends on your school and school board and province. Our education is ostensibly outcomes-based (so for the baking WWI example, an outcome that that works towards could be "[students will] analyze similarities and differences among historical narratives" (p. 17, S.2), and Alberta is working its way through a new curriculum that I'm pretty excited about, but they also love them some standardized tests. No Wave posted:I certainly encourage getting students engaged by any means possible. The current formula of telling people literature is great and then asking students why it's great even though they don't like it is completely insane. But some people, independent of medium, will have more aptitude for, even in the case of history, synthesizing disparate information into a narrative. And that's what you're testing - for the student, engagement is a means, not an end. There are a few things here. If a class is "writing" or an outcome is "students will write...", then you're correct. If an outcome is, instead, "students will analyze/synthesize/apply..." then writing is just one way to demonstrate that goal. Achieving the actual outcomes of the course is a very limited goal for a teacher, anyway. Very few teachers are going to identify with "helping students get good marks" as their motivation for teaching. Really, regardless of subject, you want to show students that the subject is interesting, important, and rewarding so that their lives are enriched by having been in your class. As for evaluation, I'm very interested in formative evaluation (a portfolio) over summative evaluation (an exam). You should use both, but summative evaluation is a lot more familiar and requires less imagination on the teacher's part. And I'm not even convinced that grades are important. As Bill Ayers puts it, I kind of want to run a grade 1 class with seventeen-year-olds in it. No Wave posted:The other danger with this approach is that you're allowing students to identify as not being very good at "writing", for example, instead of focusing on the fact that pretty much all skills are teachable (barring a literal physical handicap such as your volleyball example). It can't really be worse than the status quo, so it doesn't really worry me the same way your approach to child-rearing does, so whatever. Yeah, this is a problem. Grammar and spelling are the BEDMAS and quadratics of the social sciences, and our schools are really shifting away from the rote memorization and repetition that those skills require, and you can see it now in new university students who lack the vocabulary and grammar to follow and comprehend primary or complex sources. You also have to figure out how to get students out of their comfort zones so that they can actually grow. I don't know how to solve that without sacrificing some engagement. I have a nightmare where my practicum mentor teacher has a student writing "definitely beautiful" on the board 100 times while the other students watch in silence and I have to teach that way to do well in my practicum. Also, I'm just a first-year education student. This may be exactly the same thing I experienced as an unqualified infantry officer learning about 4th gen warfare and Sun Tzu and Clausewitz and knowledge about conflict and development, full of ideas on how to lead a platoon to actually make a difference in people's lives in a warzone but totally unprepared for the realities of the bureaucracy and the limitations and inertia of the people under and above me. I'm pretty sure that all these dreams and ideas will crash down around me as soon as I encounter an overbearing principal or recalcitrant student and I'll go back to the rows of sleeping students while I lecture to a chalk board. Good intentions and all that.
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Jan 11, 2014 16:34
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tuyop posted:And I'm not even convinced that grades are important. As Bill Ayers puts it, I kind of want to run a grade 1 class with seventeen-year-olds in it. tuyop posted:Yeah, this is a problem. Grammar and spelling are the BEDMAS and quadratics of the social sciences, and our schools are really shifting away from the rote memorization and repetition that those skills require, and you can see it now in new university students who lack the vocabulary and grammar to follow and comprehend primary or complex sources. You also have to figure out how to get students out of their comfort zones so that they can actually grow. I don't know how to solve that without sacrificing some engagement. I have a nightmare where my practicum mentor teacher has a student writing "definitely beautiful" on the board 100 times while the other students watch in silence and I have to teach that way to do well in my practicum. The trick is to give them material/present it in such a way that they have an opinion/perspective that they want to express.
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Jan 11, 2014 17:51
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Jeffrey posted:I have never heard of a high school(or anywhere else) teaching classes on taxidermy. That sounds pretty cool, should have made big mouth actual bass. I guess they don't teach it there anymore sadly. My dad took taxidermy from the same teacher when he was in high school. I mainly did ducks since my dad was a duck hunter and I could always get cool specimens. I also did a crow and a couple pigeons and starlings. And a turkey fan. Lots of people did fish. I still dabble with taxidermy a little bit. I will admit I'm pretty poor at it, and it's time consuming. Doing three in a semester was actually a considerable amount of work.
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Jan 11, 2014 18:05
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Just gonna put this here.     Edit: Just got off the phone with the bank, the payment will come out Monday or Tuesday and a letter that I can send to the insurance company will come soon after. 
tuyop fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Jan 17, 2014 |
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Jan 17, 2014 15:17
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Let me be the first to congratulate you! That albatross is finally removed from your neck. Good work!
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Jan 17, 2014 17:35
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GO TUYOP!!!! Nice work you two!
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Jan 17, 2014 19:36
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tuyop posted:Just gonna put this here. Time to celebrate! Go buy a Mini! Congrats!
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Jan 17, 2014 23:16
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tuyop posted:Just gonna put this here. Now, may we have shiny new charts?
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Jan 18, 2014 18:43
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meanieface posted:
What kind of charts would you like? I have this one. 
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Jan 19, 2014 15:11
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That better be a chart of your basil profit. Congratulations, you baller.
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Jan 20, 2014 06:24
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Alright, so this is category expenses since February 2013. So divide the amounts by 11. The "uncategorized" is cash withdrawals, mostly. gently caress that.  Predictable holiday savings then spending from those savings represented here.  Here's one that YNAB made. Expenses for the past three months. "Hidden" is mostly our security deposit, which was significant. I'm posting this because I think it'll be significant for budgeting for the next 12 months. Like, I know that my car consumes about 1200/month. Almost 400 of that being payment, which is now gone, but the consideration is that the car will need to be replaced someday so we should probably figure out what we might replace it with. (Truck with a house on the back? Yes please!) But you can see that public transit has taken a big chunk out of the car expenses for the past 3 months, which averaged only 870 including car payment. We've basically replaced the car costs with housing costs. The big low-hanging fruit from January and December is our rent. We need a roommate but I'm SO LAZY. There are still pictures that need hanging up and my "office" is full of boxes of useless poo poo that need to be disposed of. And gently caress groceries here. gently caress them so hard.
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Jan 20, 2014 14:09
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tuyop posted:And gently caress groceries here. gently caress them so hard. Does this make you rethink any "teach in the frozen tundra" plans you had for after school?
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Jan 20, 2014 17:14
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dreesemonkey posted:Does this make you rethink any "teach in the frozen tundra" plans you had for after school? No, I've been talking to lots of native students here at the aboriginal student center. They say that many people in the remote north subsist on like, caribou that they buy from hunters for a pretty reasonable price or barter for services. Spaghetti is $85/box but nobody eats spaghetti except green mining workers. Besides, toeshoes collects a bonus here for living expenses which more than accounts for the differences in food and rent costs. Before we'd move it would just be a matter of collecting data and figuring out the cost/benefit of the thing.
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Jan 20, 2014 17:29
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 Debt-Free Today!  2 years, 5 months, 26 days later. An average rate of $65/day (about three hours of work, if you include weekends). Based on Mint, our combined earnings for that period were $180 092, so debt servicing was an easy 32.8% of our income for the whole period. tuyop fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Jan 21, 2014 |
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Jan 21, 2014 13:55
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Congrats! You`ve come far enough that the only joke I could make is a reference to one of the other "Help me out of debt!" threads, that's pretty telling.
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Jan 21, 2014 14:52
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Congrats! I followed the thread from the beginning, and if someone told me I'd be learning lessons from you about happiness and frugality, I would have been shocked. Now start planning to go retire to the shitbucket-equipped yurt of your dreams!
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Jan 21, 2014 15:23
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Well done Tuyop...how do you feel?
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Jan 21, 2014 15:38
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Congratulations Tuyop!!! My husband and I still have about 2 years till we are debt-free(but that includes a mortgage). Echoing the question, how does it feel? And what have you learned?
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Jan 21, 2014 16:47
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Congratulations! Man, this thread is so boring now.
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Jan 21, 2014 17:07
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Old Fart posted:Man, this thread is so boring now. Heh, let me try something. Tuyop, have you thought about going on a trip to celebrate? Road trip to watch the superbowl, or a vacation to Dubai?
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Jan 21, 2014 17:11
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In a desperate attempt to feel something again BFC convinces tuyop that he should get a balloon mortgage on his yurt.
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Jan 21, 2014 17:13
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Baller.
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Jan 21, 2014 18:20
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Jeffrey posted:In a desperate attempt to feel something again BFC convinces tuyop that he should get a balloon mortgage on his yurt. History is doomed to repeat itself. BFC is going to create a yurt-based mortgage-backed security investment scheme that will cause a massive economic collapse of the yurt industry. Congrats, tuyop, you crazy Canuck! 
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Jan 21, 2014 18:52
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Congrats tuyop! I always had faith in you(r BASIL scheme)!!
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Jan 21, 2014 19:03
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moana posted:Congrats tuyop! I always had faith in you(r BASIL scheme)!! The scheme panned out by providing us with delicious fresh HERBS for like a year for around 6 bux. Then we moved and all the plants died. 
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Jan 21, 2014 19:24
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tuyop posted:
Congrats buddy  Our debt journey was really similar in terms of $/day and income percentage over that time ($71/day; ~34% of our income over that time). Funny how stuff like that works out
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Jan 21, 2014 20:01
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Nice job, Tuyop. Also, you are spot-on about you being a naive 1st-year education student. It's kind of adorable reading your dreams about creating engaging lessons. The real truth is that there will for sure be a few kids who sense your greenness and make it their year-long quest to make you have a meltdown. I think you might be a little more resistant since you have some experience supervising others. Kids can be pretty impressively lovely though. I sound like a bitter old teacher but I love teaching, you just have to have a realistic idea of what you can achieve. Don't forget all these cool alternate assessment ideas, but maybe for your first assignments, keep it simple. Too much choice can be paralyzing, especially for kids. And some like I said will make it their job to complain about anything, including "unfairness" whether real or perceived. They know as a new teacher you will feel like you should acknowledge and address their concerns, and might even be dumb enough to do it in front of the class. If you fall for it you've lost control. Anyhow, if you're expecting it like it sounds like you are, you will probably not be so miserably incompetent like I was my first year. Good luck with everything.
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Jan 21, 2014 23:14
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Thanks everyone, I guess I should post a reflection to wrap up the thread. Beware, there is a wall of text coming. Looking back, the change has been pretty dramatic. I started this thread still very exhausted from university and feeling more than a little bit lost. I had traveled in a way that I thought sounded cool, finished a degree that I thought sounded pretty impressive, and in a job that was fairly prestigious with a nice set of experiences already under my belt. I was also totally miserable. I even hated the idea of being happy, because it would mean that I had settled for good enough and trapped myself with contentment. If I could just stay miserable or discontent, then I would constantly want better. I had an intense fear of dying as an unimpressive person who had never helped anyone or honoured the gifts that I had been given by my parents, community, and the universe in general. I was constantly looking for ways to live a life full of passion and adventure. My experiences traveling had left me feeling even more lonely and disappointed and I had a strange, constant desire for nesting. I was longing for a "normal" that I imagined as an office job and spouse and children which was in direct contradiction to what I thought was most valuable. I hated myself for that feeling. I spent and spent because I pictured savings and financial security as a Scrooge McDuck caricature where I would gain pleasure from talking about my pension prorating and compound interest and the imaginary numbers growing larger and larger in my bank account for no reason other than to make the number larger - compared to the value that I placed on experience and its supposed capacity to finally allay the sense of shame that I felt about my life. I constantly said, "you can't take it with you," and people around me agreed. I came to this thread telling everyone that it was no big deal because I would just earn more later. My credit ran out at the same time that I hit a snag in my career. All of a sudden the promises of more money, more experiences and opportunities to help people, and more opportunities to be impressive were in doubt. I was forced to sit and do literally nothing and take stock of my finances, and later, my conception of what it was to live well. I didn't really have the tools to cope with this, I had a pretty good grasp of using reduction and logic to make other people feel stupid, but no idea how to situate or explain the emergent facts of my life or the ways that I was feeling. I went a little bit mad trying to make the best of my situation with diet and exercise and avoided thinking about the greater reasons beyond why that promise of more was important to me at all. I was ironically playing into the exact desire for that endless more-for-more's-sake that the Scrooge McDuck caricature represents, but I thought I was good because my more was not numbers of dollars, but numbers of countries visited, or pounds lifted, or women slept with, future lives saved. I was not interested in "enough" in any way because that was, by definition, a compromise, and I thought that refusing to settle for enough was a heroic quality. One of the earliest, and biggest, turning points that I remember was when I had been working long enough to know that my job was going to disappoint my goals and that my dreams had no basis in reality. I started to hate the job and calculated (based on this thread) how many hours of each of my working days had already been spent and how many I needed just to live. There was no day left for anything but paying for the past and the "requirements" of my lifestyle. I was trapped in this job that I hated and couldn't leave because I'd even leveraged my future work to pay for my oh-so-impressive degree in basket weaving and Bad poo poo People Do Studies. I found a little bit of solace for my insatiability by imagining or practicing ways to minimize my expenses. I ate just rice and beans ($90/month for food!), cycled 70 kilometers a day to and from work with a 25-year-old bicycle and no gear (for awhile), lived in a Fredericton version of the house from Fight Club for $165/month. I did this and it made me feel "hard" and impressive again for the frugality of it, which was really more of the same. When there was absolutely no way to continue in my career, after my third attempt was stopped by my injury, I felt totally hopeless. I was trapped in my job with absolutely no other option for at least another year (it turned out to be almost two). I constantly thought about killing myself. I hated the idea of being a leach on the rehab resources that legitimately hurt people needed or declaring bankruptcy and taking the "easy way" out and living with the defeat of my debt forever - those were the only two options. I was separated from toeshoes just as our relationship was changing our lives, she was my only support network because I was so bitter and angry at my coworkers. I was taking big doses of muscle relaxants and anti-depressants and started to drink heavily after she left. I couldn't sleep. I would stay up all night, drinking and weeping and go to work stinking of booze. Eventually, I told my boss that I couldn't live like this anymore and was worried that I would kill myself. After some impressively quick work from the medical side and the head of our organization, I was sent to live with toeshoes and get help where my support network was. When I got there I immediately had to see two doctors and an addiction counselor. All three thought that I needed to be hospitalized because I was such a mess, I avoided that. This period was the second major turning point. With help, I realized that my expectations of my life were endless and unrealistic. The good news was that I was set up to make myself miserable forever, which was my goal (because that's the path to endless improvement!), the bad news was that being miserable forever is unsustainable and leads to depression and suicide. I read Epictetus and Seneca and Mr. Money Mustache. I read Your Money or Your Life and a bunch of other financial self-help books. I started using YNAB. Toeshoes and I combined our finances and totally removed all stress from our relationship with money. Nothing changed except my thinking and I still hated my job, but I learned that the goal was not more but enough. I quit drinking completely, and prescription drugs except when the pain was very bad. I learned to say thanks for my gifts and control the things that I could control, internalize the parts of things over which I had some control, and ignore the things over which I had none. Ironically, some people in my life started to tell me how impressed they were, with my finances, growth, recovery, whatever. The best part was that I didn't really care. Every day I thought about losing the things that I loved and those things were like new to me. I had more than enough. Eventually, the army kicked me out for my mental instability and my back and decided that it was their fault so they'd pay me to find other work. Like my first degree, I feel that this is an incredible gift. I feel the same, almost-sacred responsibility to collect as much knowledge as possible at all times in case someday it might help someone. The difference is that the first time around I felt a constant sense of guilt that I was wasting my time when I could be helping, that I could do more, or that the world was my fault. Now I make sure that I do my best and go to sleep feeling proud that I could do no more, that I did enough today. The strange thing is that I don't feel any different. I don't feel any more rich or free. The last stage of debt repayment was not a ball-and-chain because there was nothing else we wanted to do with the money. Every day I feel joy for the things that I have and the things that I could buy are simply not needed. This is not to say that the dollars-and-cents are not important, or that I won't buy silly plastic noisemakers ever again, but that something much greater has happened here. Moving forward, I want to keep in mind that the greatest danger is the trap of luxury. I hope that I can honour what you've all done for me and the work and lives of the people who have made this possible. All of your time and work - and the time and work and lives of the other people who helped me - saved my life and freed me from the constant desire that has made me miserable my whole life up until now. I can't describe how amazing and important this is. The small facts of the tough love and the jokes and the celebrations of small victories do not add up to the life that you've helped me build but that life exists regardless only as a consequence of those small facts. Thank you, you guys are awesome.
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Jan 22, 2014 16:56
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 00:57 |
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I think a lot of us had some sense that you were going through some mental issues (which were in part the source of your money issues), but I doubt any of us realized how bad it had gotten for you. I certainly never had the impression you were abusing drugs or had become suicidally depressed. I'm impressed that you managed to push through it, though, and I'm really happy if anything I said was helpful to you (or to anyone else). I don't think luxury has to be a trap. My view is "all things in moderation" and that includes luxuries; it's OK to treat yourself to something really really nice, occasionally, as long as you don't do so to excess or to the detriment of your other goals. I think the desire to be a force of change for good in the world is laudable, but I think you can do that (such as by teaching) while simultaneously enjoying some of the finer things in life, and that the two needn't be in conflict. Anyway good luck tuyop (and toeshoes). I wish you both the best.
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Jan 22, 2014 17:28
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