You know how one thing leads to another? It started with the boys' closets...Mr. D chewed me out because Mr. B wore jeans with holes in them to the funeral the other weekend. I went through their closet and pulled everything ratty/torn/ripped/stained and replaced it by going shopping at Old Navy. Somewhere a child in a Chinese sweatshop got a small raise, right? Seriously, $72 for FOUR pairs of pants and SEVEN shirts. Something is fundamentally wrong there, folks.
But I digress.
Then I got after Mr. D to clean out HIS closet--which resulted in TWO GIANT GARBAGE BAGS full of clothes he never wears. I already had five boxes of outgrown toys, books and videos slated for the thrift shop--in addition to some household goods and my brown J. Jill turtleneck sweater that makes me look stumpy so I never wear it. And a sewing machine that I bought thinking I'd morph into a craftacular human being. And place mats I never use, candles I'll never burn and purses I never carry.
Which led to opening up a couple boxes in the basement while I was carrying up the loot for the thrift shop. I unearthed all of the paperwork from my Master's program back in the 90's...I went to UW-Madison and graduated with a MS in Curriculum & Instruction. Fear me, people, I can totally diagnose the fundamental racist underpinings of an ethnocentric text. I waded through a mountain of notes and articles wondering at my self-righteous intellectual piety back then. I'm so glad I quit academia--I would have evolved into a total ass. But I was really good at it--I played the game well, spitting out in class discussions everything my professors wanted to hear, challenging my fellow students on their pedagogy, research methods and their inferior preconceived ideals. (Yes, academia is really just a giant debate where everyone tries to come out superior in an argument--I still do this, but I'd be even worse if I'd stayed there.)
There lies three years and thousands of tuition dollars--slated for the recycling truck.
It scared me a little, going through this box. I was so sucked in to a world where nothing mattered but ideas and theories and research. Not that these things don't matter, they do! But it's easy to turn into a judgmental talking head when all you do is sit around libraries and classrooms pontificating on what a crummy job schools and policy makers and teachers are doing. For all my knowledge (and I am surprised at my retention--I haven't cracked this box open in over a decade!), I think I do more to help schools as a SAHM who leads the local PTA than I would have done as an Education Professor. Because once those young teachers hit the trenches, all theory--Friere, hooks, Heath and Foucault--they don't matter that much.
Which is not to say I'm throwing it all away. I'm keeping a small pile of papers. My thesis is in there, as are a few articles I have special fondness for, like Carl A. Grant's Culture and Teaching: What do Teachers Need to Know?
I'll keep this--for posterity.
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