Cute Girls

They look wonderful. They smell wonderful. They’re wonderful to hug. I’m a big fan of cute girls.

In other Ramblings… I love to spend time with people. Really, I love to. That’s why this first half of the semester is driving me crazy. I’m taking a First Block class that requires at least 10 hours of time in class each week. It’s made me so wildly short on time that I almost never get to spend time with friends, or even make many friends in the first place. I’ve decided that while yes, I do need to be busy and have things to do, I also need time to be a person. I need to be able to play a little bit and remind myself that there is a life to live! That I’m not in college for its own sake, but to be able to support myself and a family so I can live that life.

I’ve also decided lately: I don’t think Spanish Teaching is for me. Here are some of my reasons. First, I have a lot of really negative memories from my school experience growing up. I mean, I had some teachers who did some pretty crummy things that I didn’t know how to deal with when I was so young. They honestly were complicit in the production of the negative atmosphere upon which some of my most difficult times in life festered. I had a lot of teachers who were just plain bad teachers - only the teachers union seemed to be keeping them in place. Teachers with emotional issues that should have kept them from teaching. Those memories make it so school is not the #1 place I want to go back to.

Second, I love learning to speak Spanish, but I don’t love Spanish. On top of that, my Spanish skills really aren’t so wonderful. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve really come a long way and I’m proud of where I’m at considering the limits of my learning opportunities. However, I don’t think that my proficiency will ever get to the point it needs to be at to do justice to the subject and to the students who enroll in it. The main issue here, however, is that I don’t enjoy the subject itself enough.

Finally, I don’t want to be stressed out all the time about finances because I’m trying to survive on the meager salary of a teacher in America’s public schools. This reminds me of the talk Elder Dallin H. Oaks gave at the last General Conference of the Church. Describing the differences between the use of the priesthood authority in the Church versus in the home, he said, “Church callings are always temporary, but family relationships are permanent.” I believe that that can be extended to imply that because family relationships extend into eternity, whereas career/profession/employment is only a temporary situation during mortality, the good that I could do to society through my career is secondary to the good I will be able to do for my family by supporting them and being an emotionally-available father for them. I doubt I would be able to operate at top capacity if I was constantly fretting over finances.

So those are my latest thoughts. I also recently discovered that BYU has a “Computers and Language” minor that I could combine easily with a Linguistics major. Hmm… now to find myself one of those cute girls!