Tuesday

First off, whoa people. Whoa. It's just a pig. Can the pig-lovers and bacon-eaters find a way to get along? P.S. I love when posts about tea-cup pigs get more comments than an entire week's worth of posts about my actual life. I should really stick to the inane more often. :)

Moving on, I had my first day back at Starbucks. I'd been gone two weeks. Not two months, not two years. And yet, I felt useless. Oh I wasn't rusty making the drinks, and I could still run the cash register, but I wasn't on top of things. My boss had done some rearranging of our supplies, so every time I tried to restock something, I had to root around for a while or just give up and ask her where we kept it now. And there's new paperwork for our cleaning tasks. And next week Starbucks is launching a whole new way to brew coffee (a topic for a later discussion), which all the other baristas have known about for two weeks. And I'm just finding out today. I'd left at the top of my field - the employee everyone else came to with questions, and who everyone counted on - and now, not.

How much more of a transition is it going to be when / if I get back in the classroom full-time? I left teaching at the top of my field. I was teaching an advanced placement class. I was well-respected by my students, my department, my administrators. People came to me for advice, wanted my opinion on lesson plans and classroom management. I, and excuse my blatant lack of humility, was a really freaking awesome teacher. I knew how to change the toner in the copy machine for God's sake - do you know how high that will rank you in teacher world!?!?

And now I've been gone for almost two years. I keep working to get myself back in the classroom, but truthfully, it's absolutely terrifying. For as much as schools haven't changed in two years (hell, two hundred years), I feel vastly behind. I love hearing stories from HistoryGirlie about what's going on at the school I used to be a part of, but it also makes me panic. She talks about technology I'm barely familiar with, being used as an integral part of instruction (using a flip camera to teach geography? say whu?). She tells tales of enlightened discussions and debates over grading and best practices and assessments, and the concepts that are becoming common place in many classrooms. And I don't have insights to add to those discussions anymore. Nor do I even know what the "right answer" is for when a future principal interviews me for a job and asks me my views on grading or best practices or assessments.

Am I going off my nutty here? Who else is currently "not working in their field" (the oh-so-clever euphemism we use to hide the unpleasant truth that we're currently stocking shelves / waiting tables / making coffee or doing anything but what we majored in in college)? Are you worried about the knowledge gap between what you knew then, and what you're expected to know to hold the same job now? Is this just a worry of mine because I'm an anal-retentive (yes, hyphenated) perfectionist who can't bear the thought of completing a job to less than stellar reviews? (Or this is just a worry because I stood around all day searching for the extra coffee filters and using my mind for little else but random worries?)