Crisis.
I think I know what's happening to me. By doing my job the way I think is only, merely conscientious, I'm coring myself as if I were an apple. I can be more specific: if I'm not with students, talking to them, telling them things, listening to them tell me things, deciding things for them, with them, against them, trying to understand why they talk and listen and think and decide the way they do, I am marking stuff, which is all the above except it's with eyes and a pen, rather than ears and a face, or I'm reducing a book to terms intelligible to them. I have lots of fun, I feel energized while in lessons, in rehearsals, in meetings, even in remedials; at the end of the day I am exhausted, but I believed it was the wholesome exhaustion of an honest day's work. On weekends, I don't go out, because I think, it's time for some "me" time, to be spent in solitude and misanthropy - again a healthy balance. Only now, I realize, my weekends, my free time, cannot be spent in solitude, because I have not spent the week in companionship. My students are not my friends: I have followed their lives and minds, thinking they fulfil my own outside of my profession, but they do not. Reading an A Level Lit text is not satsifying as just reading, though it is the same book - reading for pleasure, reading without object, I miss that. In avoiding treating my students as objects, I have over-compensated: I treat them as people. So, by the time the weekend rolls round, I have expended all my amiability, all my patience, and have got only what can only be (I do not blame them; they will improve, with time - that is the conceit the entire philosophy of my job is based on!) a poor, unequal sort of society in return. Mine is not a job where work and work product are so sundered that the worker becomes disillusioned; nor is it exactly where one can grasp one's work in one's hands and possess it, calling it the end of working, and so the beginning of more. How do you contemplate work that demands socializing with people who by definition are not yet ready for society? where the end of work is not marked by possession but by loss?
