I had my first babysitting job when I was 8. Parents trusted an eight-year-old with their wee ones? But maybe it was a different time. I got paid $3 an hour and worked lots of $3-hours to save up money to buy . . . I have no idea what (what DO, or should I say DID, 8-year-olds buy? Now I think they buy make-up and Slut, er, I mean Bratz, Dolls).
When I was fourteen, I got a summer job picking strawberries. We got paid by the flat. The faster you picked, the more money you made. It was pretty brutal work. Strawberries grow on very low plants, hidden underneath the leaves. We had to sit on our knees on straw, bent over, and creep our way down each long, long row. It was hot, so we all wore shorts and ended up with little red pricked marks, like a very bad rash, up and down our shins. We started at 5 a.m. every morning to avoid the heat, but by 10 or 11, the sun was blazing and cooking the overripe strawberries to our skin. The memory smells delicious, but it was enough to put me off strawberries for several years.
When I was 17, I got a job as a camp counselor and swim teacher. I was at a Jewish Community Center camp on Seneca Lake in upstate New York, imaginatively named "Camp Seneca Lake." I had been a camper there and a counselor-in-training, but most of the people had going to camp since they were 7 or knew each other from their surburban schools (read schools that had other Jewish people) so I knew hardly anyone. My rural fashion sense fell woefully short. I felt out of place, not Jewish enough for the first time in my life. The first month, I taught swimming lessons and was a life guard. The kids at camp ranged from 7 to 15 and only some could swim. The second month, I was a counselor for 10 7 year-old girls away from home for the first time. I loved it, but I can't say they did. Most of them were scared and lonely and couldn't figure out how they ended up in a cabin with 9 other little girls vying for two teenage counselors' attention. I spent most of the month dealing with bedwetting and an overwhelming fear of squirrels (which isn't an unreasonable fear, if you ask me).
The summer before I left for college, I got a job working for a farm. I spent the first part of the summer hoe-ing (sp?!) pumpkins. We had to get up at 4 or 5 in the morning to get to the pumpkin patch (sounds very Rockwellian, huh?). We spent 5 or 6 hours hoe-ing the weeds out of the pumpkin patch. It was brutal work. It was boring, and hot, and hard labor. After the ho(e) work dried up (ha!), I sat at a corn stand on the side of the road. It was mindnumbing, although I did manage to get through "War and Peace" and get a lovely (farmer's) tan - on the front half of my body.
After my freshman year of college, I got a job as a lifeguard at a hotel pool and as a bus girl in the town's one fancy restaurant. I "worked" from 9 to 3 at the pool (where no one swam), drove home, showered, and worked from 4-whenever bussing tables. I hated the lifeguarding. There were no lives to guard and the creepy maintenance man used to watch me from the roof of the hotel. I loved the restaurant work, though. I loved the hustle and bustle of it. I loved that time flew by. I loved learning about food and wine. I loved the people that came in for a nice meal after a long, lazy summer day on the lake. I loved the eye-opening post-work debauchery. The servers and bartenders were older then me and took me to bars with them and I felt grown-up and sophisticated ordering Sutter Home white zinfandel. I started waiting tables and worked at that restaurant for five years. The restaurant years deserve a whole post and this road isn't THAT long and winding.
In college, I decided to be a high school English teacher. It seemed to fit. I liked books and I liked kids. Other than the paltry salary, it sounded perfect. In my youthful idealism, I thought I could make a difference. (I sound cynical now, but I actually still believe that a good teacher can change a kid's life.). So I dual majored in English (and Textual Studies, the obnoxiously official name of my major) and secondary education. I was disappointed. I loved my English classes, but the education classes seemed . . . obvious and condescending. The other students were . . . mediocre. Those who can do and those who can't, teach, right? I met very few teachers-to-be who could
do (and I'm not sure I am one of them - after all
see Great American Novel. Oh wait, there is none). So I headed off to two student teaching placements. The state mandated that high school teachers-to-be had to teach in urban and non-urban settings and middle school and high school. The first was in a suburban middle school. It was a wealthy suburb and the school was beautiful. I "taught" 8th grade, but my host teacher was everything that is wrong with the school system. Not only did she have shoes, brooches, earrings and sweaters for every holiday (Easter shoes? Check. St. Patrick's day sweater? Check. You get the picture), she had a very strict curriculum that she had used since she started teaching 30 years before, and she NEVER deviated. She "let" me do the unit on mythology, but I basically just read her lesson plans. I even had to show a slide show. This was over 10 years ago, but even then, slide shows were about 20 years outdated. Beyond that, I didn't really like 8th graders. I had a hard time admitting that at the time because I was very invested in the idea of myself as someone who loved kids - all of them. But 8th graders care more about what their peers think than anyone else. I know I did. I would have rather died (and I think I mean this almost literally) than embarrass myself in front of my "friends" when I was 13. So it isn't so much fun to teach English or literature to people who won't talk about it. My second placement was in an urban high school. 30% of the kids had special needs, which in non-teachery speak means that they had learning disabilities or had never learned to read or had been exposed to too much lead paint or had fetal alcohol syndrome. The school was flat broke. There weren't enough books in the book room to teach an entire class (let alone two or three classes) the same book at the same time. We had to offer extra credit to kids to go get their own books from the library or the bookstore. They had on-site daycare for the kids with kids. There were 14-year-olds in my classes who were on their second child. One girl told me she wanted to commit suicide. Another told me she had been raped by her father. Another's water broke in the hallway. The smartest of my students aspired to the military because they didn't even know they had other options. At our open house, 4 parents (with a total about 13 teeth) showed up. I had 120 students. I couldn't figure out how to do it. I didn't know how to punish a student for not reading when he worked until midnight the night before to pay his family's heating bills. And some of the kids . . . for good reason or not . . . were scary and mean. I was 21 and they were 18 and 19. I had no handle on how to assert control. Plus, I was too close. I cared too much (which is to say at all) about their social stuff. I found myself starting to get teachers' lounge sydrome. The first time I heard a veteran teacher refer to a kid as a "little shit," I got on my high horse fast enough to win the Derby. But then it all started to sink in. The walls were dingy. The carpets were ripped and stained. There weren't enough desks or books or teachers. The kids felt forgotten and they were right. I couldn't do it. I started to lose my idealism and while I never referred to a student as a "little shit," I saw where the teacher was coming from and knew I had to get out. I had started to apply for post-graduation teaching jobs (even considered one at my own high school, god forbid) but I just couldn't go through with it. For one thing, I thought I'd always wonder whether I could have done more than teach high school. What if that was it for me and the biggest challenge (and yes it is incredibly challenging, but not intellectually) I could handle. For another, I wanted to get out of school. I'd only ever been in school and what if the only reason I wanted to be a teacher was that I had never seen examples of other professions. I saw a vision of myself, twenty years in, teaching "MacBeth" for the 1,000th time and wondering why I ever liked reading (or kids) in the first place. But most importantly, I could see myself becoming someone I hated. So I had to get out.
I floated around for a bit. I considered grad school. I read about (and promptly rejected) the Peace Corp. I thought about teaching English in Korea. I decided for some reason I wanted to read books on tape. All the while, I was back at the restaurant and felt unbearably stuck. It was a great job when it didn't stretch out forever in front of me, when it was an in-between, summer gig, but when I could imagine myself in orthopedic shoes with a smoking habit and bad roots, I thought it might be time to quit. And after casting about for months feeling unmoored and unsure of who I was or where or what I wanted to be, running into people I knew from high school at every turn, I finally decided on law school. It wasn't a well-considered decision. Here was the exact thought process. "Hmmm, what am I good at? I can read and write and speak well. What jobs use those skills? Oh, I'll be a lawyer!" I had no exposure to lawyers other than on TV. I didn't know what lawyers did. I had no deep interest in the workings of justice. I just didn't quite know what else to do. And so, after a job as a receptionist at an internet service provider, another waitressing job, this time at a brew pub, and another stint at the restaurant, off to law school I went.
And now, as I sit here, I don't hate my job. And it was a bit of a journey to get here too (and I am going to cut myself off before I write my (uninteresting) autobiography). And I am not unhappy - mostly - with what I do. I have my complaints. I'd like to work less. I'd like it if the people I worked for had a better sense of perspective - after all, we aren't curing cancer. But there are things I genuinely enjoy about it. But as the people around me make changes and step off the path I'm on (and my path is actually maybe like the side of the road where you pull off to fix a tire rather than the main path), I started thinking about how I got here and whether there is somewhere else I'm supposed to be.
