An Introduction

I’ve decided to make a concerted effort to write consistently. I’ve tried to do this many times before, but writing well requires two important prerequisites: patience and time. I have no problem achieving the patience requirement. Every day I attempt to teach lessons to 28 squirrelly 10 and 11-year-olds. If I wasn’t an exceptionally patient person the only way to see me would be through a small window looking into my padded cell.

Time is my issue. The breaks (although unpaid), I get as a teacher are fantastic. There is no doubt about that. I love that on any given Monday through Friday in July or August I can head into the mountains and spend the day on a trail without even thinking about how much vacation time I just used for this selfish endeavor. However, the ten months on the job are ridiculously intense. To be good at teaching, which I demand of myself, means 12-hour days every single work day, not to mention six hour stints every Sunday. The kids are in my immediate care from 8:40 to 3:10 Monday through Friday. These six and one half hours are intensely busy without a moment of respite. Teach a lesson. Give an assignment. Make my rounds to every student to individually check to make sure they understand the assignment. Make my rounds to every student again to ensure they have actually started the assignment. Pull a small group of students aside to support them with a unique skill they all struggle with, while keeping tabs on the other 22 to be sure no one is stabbing someone else with a pencil or passing notes or spending unbelievable amounts of time in the bathroom or vomiting or some other unimaginable episode that will require my immediate attention. The other five and a half hours I spend at work are spent grading student work, attending endless meetings, contacting parents, and planning the next day in hopes that I can teach meaningful lessons that are also entertaining enough to keep video game brains focused long enough so the key points are logged in their memories long enough to pass the state-mandated test given in May. Needless to say, it’s exhausting and spending hours working on writing after I get home at 7:30 isn’t always my top priority.

That said, I still want to make the effort to write. I enjoy it and people have told me they like reading my writing. Of course I fully understand the possibility they are just being polite. I’ve decided blogging will be a good medium for me because the entries need not be long and each entry can be of an entirely different focus. In July and August, I had been writing daily, but with the blog I will make my goal of having a new post once every week or two. A much more manageable goal in my opinion.

I decided to call my blog “Panacea” mostly because I couldn’t think of anything else clever to call it and I like the sound of the word. Those aren’t great reasons for choosing a name, so I decided to make one up this morning that is a much better story (I think). Alecia and I saw the new movie The Muppets yesterday. I loved it. If you’re looking for a hilarious, light-hearted movie, which I always am, this will be a great one to see. Anyway, in the movie the characters describe laughter as the third greatest gift behind children and ice cream. My goal with “Panacea” is to provide that third greatest gift. I’m sure I’ll miss the mark sometimes, but I’ll always try to make my posts funny enough to at least draw a little laugh here and there. Since the word panacea means a remedy for all disease or ills, and they say laughter is the best medicine, I have decided to call this blog “Panacea”. So there you have it, the fake story behind the name of this blog.

My first few entries are from a variety of things I have written over the course of the last six months or so. Further entries will be sparkling new originals.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Panacea…