Pandora’s Box (advice to first-years / first year reflection)

According to Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, Pandora lifted the lid of her infamous box “and out flew plagues innumerable, sorrow and mischief for mankind … One good thing, however, was there – Hope”

Be that as it may, I doubt hope was the first thing early man noticed as he was engulfed by the plagues, sorrows, and, perhaps more aptly in this case, plain old mischief released from the box. So it goes with teaching.

Later, talking about Norse mythology, Hamilton allows that “even these sternly hopeless Norsemen, whose daily life in their icy land through the black winters was a perpetual challenge, saw a far-away light break through the darkness”

Wherever the light is your first semester of teaching, it’s almost too far away to matter. And although we’re not in the blackest of black winters, I’ve heard descriptions equally disheartening and hardly less poetic of the first term teaching. A second-year’s droll prediction of how life would look roundabout the middle of my first semester:
“It’s like being in the middle of a deep, dark pool when you are too far away to reach either shore and too tired to swim”

Sad but true.

The only thing that any of us can tell you (and we will …) is that it does get better.

HJ told us at the Christmas dinner that his first year teaching was the longest year of his life … but that the second year flew by.

RJ insisted that I take days off the first term, while insisting equally that by 4th quarter I wouldn’t even want them anymore.

Ben will tell you a hundred times that no one has ever found the second year to be harder than the first.

And my entire “team” this summer was convinced that by the third year, you’ll really have the hang of it.

So sometime next October (don’t believe everything Ben tells you, by the way, I made it through October with my sanity and managed to stave off the breakdown until mid-December, which when it came was no less traumatizing for the wait) … or December, or February, in the long haul when some person apparently even less competent than yourself decides to have you drive to Oxford for five CONSECUTIVE weekends … remember that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, that somehow, inexplicably, it WILL and DOES get better. Timing of this post could have been much more appropriate, no doubt, but I’m at the point where I am beginning to see the light break, and not just because it’s May.

Andy Dufraine, according to the Shawshank Redemption, crawled through a river of sh*t came out clean on the other side.

It happens.

You can, and you will.

ENJOY whatever you’re doing until you get here, take as much as you can from this summer (and DON’T let it stress you out!!), and remember sometime in the fall that along with the mischief of all mankind you will inevitably find hope. Far away, there is a light.