that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool

For a very long time I have been trying to pick a major. The one thing I have always wanted to consistently do is teach, but solidifying that thought has been difficult for me to do. There have been a lot of reasons for this: family, hearing from mostly unsatisfied teachers, the salary, and what looks like never ending unemployment.

Not long ago I changed my schedule. I added two intro classes for majors that made double what a teacher makes, but I ended up dropping them. The problem? I cannot see myself doing anything other than teaching. Anytime I've told people that I want to teach I usually don't get the best reaction. People will immediately comment on the salary, say every teacher they knows hates their job, or something like that. I take things personally and for years it has been hard for me to simply push all of these comments aside. But at a certain point I have a duty to myself to pursue what will make me happy. At a certain point I need to look at it as a calling, rather than just a job.

I was on Tumblr the other day and I found this quote from CNN:

We can tell our children that school is important until we’re blue in the face, they’re not stupid. They see the loudest applause is for the kids on the field. They know teachers are paid poorly and don’t drive fancy cars. They know people plan Super Bowl parties but mock the National Spelling Bee. In other words, they see the hypocrisy, and we can’t expect society to correct itself. If we want to have any lasting influence on the way our kids approach education — the way future generations approach education — then we have to grab our pom-poms and paint our faces and celebrate intellectual curiosity with the same vigor we do their athletic achievements.

I do not think this could be more true. People push education as if it's the most important thing but if someone says they want to be a teacher they are pushed away, being told that they can do something else. Students can tell what is valued in a school. They can see that the football players and basketball players are more valued than those in math club or in the speech and debate team.

I am in an honors program in my university and there are few education majors because so many people turn from the profession. I have heard so many engineers say things like, "I would teach math if the salary was higher," or "I would teach chemistry if the job had more respect." The attitudes that this country has towards education needs to be changed. Education is the tool with which you can change the world. But if education is not valued by adults, how will children learn to approach it with the respect and passion it needs.

I plan on teaching high school. By the times students reach me they may have spent years disengaged from education, and that's a bitter pill to swallow. But I can do my part to change some attitudes towards education. I will wave my pom poms for intellectual curiosity. I will show that an education can get you places that dribbling a ball cannot.

-Tate
(I apologize if this is ranty)

Little Victories

Living with an undiagnosed medical condition is hard. Having doctors brush you aside, friends not understand, and trying to make it through the maze of finding a diagnosis is nearly impossible.

I've been sick my whole life. When I was younger I had chronic ear infections then it moved on to a lot of strep throat, pneumonia, bouts of the flu, whatever it was I would catch it. When I was in the 2nd grade I had strep throat, two types of flu, and pneumonia all in one academic year. Anyone can see that this isn't exactly normal.

Always being sick wasn't something I grew out of, it just kept evolving. In high school it turned into constant sinus infections, but the thing was there was always some sort of infection but my pediatrician never stopped to think that it wasn't normal until I was 16 years old. When I was sixteen I went into septic shock, something 50% of people die from. Asides from the septic shock my kidneys almost failed, I had to be put on heavy duty oxygen in the pediatric icu, my entire body swelled and it put so much pressure on my organs that my hair started to fall out. It wasn't until this happened until I had some acknowledgment that there was a chronic syndrome going on and that was almost three years ago.

I started thinking more and more when I found two e-cards I was sent in the hospital while I was cleaning out some old stuff in my room. I know I've come far from where I was then, but it's frustrating to be searching still. I've had a couple things diagnosed but being shoved from specialist to specialist hasn't gotten me as far as I think it should.

I finally think I found a new doctor that treats one of my conditions. I see him later this month and I'm hoping he's as good as I've heard he is. For now my other doctor is working on finding more and more genetic testing to run. I can tell that she feels like she's at the end of her rope and we're both becoming more and more frustrated. Along with this frustration comes a sense of fear. In the past couple of years I have been getting worse and worse and it's hard for me to ignore it. I hear things about certain conditions that are tested for and I become scared. And what's even scarier is the fear that my doctors will completely give up on me.

I just keep reminding myself to be glad that I've come as far as I had. When you're trying to navigate the labyrinth little victories are more important than in any process. When it can take years to diagnose a rare condition any step forward needs to be recognized, any acknowledgement needs to be recognized, and being sent off to a new doctor needs to be seen as a gateway to finally figuring something out not someone giving up on you. If I hadn't been bumped around from doctor to doctor I wouldn't have ended up with the doctor I have now, and even though she's no long enough she has still figured out more than anyone else had. I need to keep all of this in mind as I wait for my appointment later this month. There comes a point where if you aren't proactive you won't be taken seriously, and that's what I've been doing and I've been getting more and more done.

All I need to do is to keep moving forward.

-Tate

One found God, four found Paris

I'm going to preface this by saying F. Scott Fitzgerald is my favorite writer and This Side of Paradise is my all time favorite book. Seeing as the Great Gatsby is coming out in theaters tomorrow I'd like to say I really don't understand why it is Fitzgerald's most popular work.

When I first had to read the Great Gatsby my sophomore year of high school I absolutely hated it and now even as an English major it is still my least favorite Fitzgerald work. Looking at it from the surface Gatsby is beautifully written. This Side of Paradise is a first novel and it shows. Paradise is touch and go for a while, but the flashes of brilliance completely make up for that. Gatsby on the other hand is well-written and much more polished, but I didn't feel the same human connection at all.
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Given all this I do understand why Gatsby is what is taught in high schools. The symbolism is so blatantly obvious that it makes it a good read for students who aren't that great at literature. All you have to do is tell the class "this is what the eyes mean, this represents the American Dream, this is what the green light means," and bam you have a class who can at least fake an essay or maybe even feel like the finally understand a work of well-known literature. Don't get me wrong, that's a good thing, kids should feel like literature is accessible, but that doesn't mean I like this book.

There's just such a lacking of depth as compared with his other books. Nick is just a moral character standing above everyone else and not even Gatsby becomes that likable by the end of the novel. The symbolism is too obvious and so is the whole critique on the American Dream. There's a reason the Great Gatsby didn't sell well at all when it was first released, even then it's not his most connectable work. While not as well written, This Side of Paradise was better received.

Amory Blaine, the main character of Paradise, is still not a saint. The themes of This Side of Paradise are similar, disillusionment, coming into adult life, the American dream, but somehow they are better conveyed. Even through a choppier writing style I felt more connected to Amory Blaine and what Fitzgerald was saying. It was more raw. There wasn't a heavy veil of symbolism to force your way through.  The bottom quote is from This Side of Paradise, and it's obvious that it's dealing with the same things as Gatsby.

“Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a reverie of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken… .”

The Great Gastby is a good piece of literature, and I will be sing it Friday, but I'm not seeing it for the plot. I am seeing it for Fitzgerald.


-Tate

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately

It turns out the hipsters were right.

It comes to no surprise to anyone that knows me personally that I am very undecided about my plans for a college major. Even though I am only ending my first year of college I'm too the point where I need to make some decisions about what I'm doing. I was complaining about it to some art majors on my floor, aka people who are following their dreams, and one of them told me to go take a walk.

This isn't the first time someone's told me this. The last time someone told me to take a walk they told me to smoke a cigarette too, but I left out that part. I only planned to be out for ten to twenty minutes but that soon turned into an hour and twenty minutes and I actually learned a lot.

I started out walking the prettiest part of campus:

I didn't stay on campus very long though. I started out wandering towards buildings that looked interesting, which almost landed me in a very sketchy place, but there was one building in particular I kept ending up in front of.

The building pictured below is where I kept ending up. 

The building is an abandoned high school that should be reopening to a charter school in the next year or two. I sat outside of this building for at least a half hour. For some reason I thought this was a very profound moment, mostly because I went on the walk to decide whether or not I wanted to be a teacher and I kept ending up back at this old high school.

Education has always been that career choice I've gone back to. I've wanted to be just about anything under the sun, but the one thing I've never been able to shake is education. Something about sitting in front of this old school made me feel more okay about things, it was like a moment where I felt like even though things are bad now it all somehow be okay.

Part of this was a quote that was carved into the top of that is carved onto the top of the building:

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us dare to do our duty as we understand it. -Abraham Lincoln

I don't know what it was, but something about this quote and that building made me feel okay. I may still not know what type of teacher I want to be, or if that's even what  I will be. But what I do feel is a greater sense of clarity, and for now that has to be enough.

-Tate

New Blog

I lost the password for my old blog, so I'm starting again here.

My last and only post on my old blog:

So Noelle and I are Blog Buddies


So as another way to further my procrastination I have decided to make this blog. Seeing as I have never had a blog that I actually had to do text posts for I'm not really sure what to say.

My name is Tate and I'm currently a freshman in college that's trying to decided what to do with my life. It's a decision that I should probably make soon since my adviser actually called me about not having a major, but I really don't know what I want to do. I know I want to be a teacher but I can't make up my mind between English and Social Studies, but I have to make my decision in the next couple days and I don't think that's enough time. I don't see how I'm supposed to figure out my entire life when I'm eighteen years old. I don't want to be one of those adults looking back at my life in my forties hating myself because of a decision I made this young, especially a decision I made under pressure.

I just wish I had more time to figure this all out of had clearer passions. All I really like to do is read, but that's not exactly a career so I'll have to figure something out.

Well I have to get on to doing homework that's due tomorrow, so goodnight for now.

-Tate