Just before the end of school one of my favorite students asked me, "Chris, are you coming back next year?" "No", I said, "I'm not." "Ah", she replied, knowingly. "Learned your lesson, huh?" She's such a sharp cookie. She was right. I learned my lesson (lessonS, actually) and I am not going back to this school next year. Or any school. Maybe sometime, but not now. The lessons that I learned are many, but among them is "Teaching is hard and pays badly". Another one is "Teaching is more satisfying when you are teaching subjects that you have an aptitude for and a knowledge of". Still another one is "Schools that are broke and far-out, and run by hippies and intellectuals, and are doing their best to make things work will not have the infrastructure in place that a first year teacher, particularly one without any sort of background in education, will need in order to succeed". This might make it seem like my year teaching was a failure - it wasn't. Or perhaps that I didn't like it - I loved it. But, in both cases there were things that didn't go the way I wanted them to. I think I was good teacher. The kids loved and respected me, and I them. We had some academic breakthroughs and, considering the challenges that we had together, I think things went really well. But many things happened that we needed help to handle and there was simply no help available. And I was unable, for a variety of reasons, to go out and find the sort of help that would have made things different. My school, to their credit, realizes this, and is acting to make it better. I believe that things will be different moving forward and I believe in the school, their mission, and their ideals. I would send Milo there. I decided, since I was switching boats anyway, that (having learned my lesson) I was not going to seek out another heavy-workload, low-pay teaching job. Back to the world wide whatchamacallit. I've got a kid to support! I applied to a few jobs, the one I wanted interviewed me, I was hired. Bang! Just like that. I work for the county - I am a civil servant. A webmaster (in the web content sense of the word, although it looks like there will be some administration and programming as well). I am, truth be told, a professional blogger as much as anything else. My job, primarily, is to conceive of and produce stories for the county web site (internally only, to begin with, eventually going to the Internet at large). Our county is around 1000 square miles, and I will be traveling to various county installations, interviewing people, taking pictures, covering events, and writing. I will be attending county court sessions. I will be talking to sheriffs and justices of the peace, and tax assessors, and all sorts of interesting people. It pays nearly double what the teaching job paid. It has better benefits (and the benefits at my school were pretty good). My job is (when I am not travelling) downtown, which I love. I can take the bus here, they even gave me a free pass. I can listen to music, draw, veg out. Didn't get to do much of that at school, let me tell you. I work right across from the Texas state capital building and it feels great to be back in the concrete jungle, such as it is.