Tomorrow I start my training to be a high school English teacher. The road to this point I have already documented and you can read if you wish. I do not have much more to say on the topic right now. Only that I am very, very grateful.
We have been living in Colorado for just over a month now, out of suitcases in my parent's house. And it couldn't have been better. The weather, the mountains, our families, our friends. I have climbed mountains and run trails, sat outside on cool July evenings and slept under the stars at 11,000 feet above sea level.
When we first arrived in town I actually got a head start on my teaching experience. My new school had a project starting this summer that my department head thought I would be a good fit for: a Great Books project, or a history of philosophy. We took critical Western thinkers from the past 3,000 years, read their works, and wrote a 4-5 page chronicle of their biography, the themes in their writing, and their legacy in Western life and thought. In my 2+ weeks on the project I covered the following thinkers: Milton (obvs), Solzhenitsyn, Dostoevsky, William James, John Dewey, Dante, Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Horace, and Edward Gibbon. In other words, I was paid well to do what I would have gladly done for free. The goal of the project is to have a Great Books elective for our students and hopefully to use the curriculum we develop in other schools as well. Thus far in my life it is the coolest intellectual project I have ever been involved in.
I am excited, which is why I am writing at what is typically my bedtime. It is not often in life that everything seems to align perfectly and you understand why it is that you have traveled the road that you have. I spent most of the past four years wondering what in the world I was doing with my life, and now it appears I have my answer: preparing for this.
