Commencement Address for Graduating Education Majors

The following was inspired by the commencement address on Deadspin today.

Good evening to you all, and first, a heart-felt congratulations to all of you here today. You are about to set out on a remarkable journey beset by challenges and filled with triumphs. I am envious of the experiences that lay ahead of you. In a way.

You have asked me here tonight to perhaps bestow some of my wisdom upon. I will gladly oblige. After all, you are all education majors (what are the odds?!) and have therefore publicly demonstrated your penchant for making terrible life decisions.

I mean come on, people! The only major more worthless than Education is Communication; you are in rarefied air of stupidity.

The best teachers in the world have not taken the most education classes; they've taught the most classes. Be honest: how many times in the past four years have you pretended you couldn't read in order to better learn how to read? A dozen? More? Do you think you learned anything from that other than how to act like you can't read? That will help you guide the futures of tomorrow's leaders.

I don't care how many times you've read Harry Wong, there is no procedure for when a kid shits on the floor. And if you want to be taken seriously, stop taking your best advice from a guy named Wong.

So, without further ado, allow me to give you some life lessons about teaching I have learned in only a year.

Your students will not appreciate what you do. During the Magic/Celtics game tonight, they showed a clip of a player speaking at a local middle school about the dangers of smoking. You'd think the little shitheads would at least be excited about being out of class. Then, a mascot did a trampoline dunk in their gym, and no one fucking clapped. Not one of those future homeless bastards clapped.

There is no better metaphor for your upcoming career.

If you teach 8th grade, don't. 8th graders are evil incarnate. They don't give a shit about anybody, but themselves. This wouldn't be a problem unto itself, except for the clusterfuck of hormones accompanying their solipsism. I hated my own blood when they were this age, I in no way would voluntarily subject myself to someone else's failed abortion in this miserable period.

There's only one solution to this. If you're a male teacher, get a vasectomy so you don't perpetuate the problem. If you're a female, sell your eggs; you'll need the cash anyway.

Do not bring your work home. See if you can follow this logic: your kids don't do their homework, why should you have to?

Mind the German factory system. The American public education schedule was established using the German factory work day as a model. In the winter, I was always in school before the sun rose and my own apathy to my job and affection for my couch was all that got me out of that decaying building before sundown.

Summer is a sacred observance. Remember how ecstatic you were at the first day of summer? The sun always shined on the last day. Someone always had a pool party and ordered pizza, no matter how old you were. You realized you could sleep in the next day, play baseball in the afternoon, and not treat a relative stranger as a parent for the better part of the day.

Now take that feeling, multiply it by a hundred, pop a Vicodin, and get a blow job from a mail-order bride and that's almost as great as the first day of summer feels when you're a teacher.

Parents are the enemy. Know it now: you are always wrong. If a student calls you a fuckin' faggot on his way out of your room while he kicks the glass pane out of your door punches a whole in the wall, you better not have the audacity to call his mother. For if you do, she will storm into your classroom and reach deep down into your soul to tell you exactly why you don't get it and where your parents went wrong in raising you. And it will probably happen while the class in front of you has gotten quiet for the first time all week. Just know it now, it will make it easier to swallow.

Conflicting standards. I told my students they needed pencils in my class. They grumbled that they couldn't afford them. Then they all pulled out their Sidekicks and Blackberries and texted their parents that they needed pencils. The brain fragments from my exploding head did not please the front row of students.

Teachers are at school more than you ever thought. I am on contract to be in our school building 20 days longer than the students. That's almost 3 weeks. That's a lot. That's a fuckload of time "teaching" without having anyone to teach. And the usually happen on Fridays. God forbid anybody get a 3 day weekend.

Worse yet, these days are populated by the same meeting in repetition. These Groundhog Days, these Sisyphean nightmares are all the same. You have a faculty meeting in the morning where all of the fatasses on your faculty have assembled a cardiac arrest spread with every sugary breakfast nugget and diabetes-inducing liquid they could find. Your principal starts off the meeting by praising you for your effort, then tells you what they're going to try to do to make sure the 20 person brawl that happened yesterday won't happen again. You'll recognize immediately that their suggested plan will do nothing, and you'll zone out.

Your body carries itself off of the cafeteria bench you've been occupying for the last two hours by the influence of the others moving around you, and only your physical motion pulls you out of your trance. You retreat to your classroom, counting down the hours until it's acceptable to disappear for a short while for lunch. You saunter about the school searching for coffee, quietly so as not to draw attention to yourself, but quickly because it's harder for an administrator to hit a moving target with bureaucratic bullshit.

You return from lunch and doctor the sign out sheet so it looks like you were only gone for a half hour. You turn off the lights in your room when you get back. When you're found there you'll claim it's because you prefer daylight. Really you don't want to be found.

When you finally can, years later, leave the school that day, you'll find the happy hour nearest your house and get loaded, pausing briefly to eat and stopping fully at 10pm, when your used-to-rising-at-6am-body decides it doesn't want to play anymore and shuts down for the night.

For you are a teacher, and that is what you have chosen. And you'll start the whole thing over again on Monday. Why? Because you hate yourself.

Enjoy your upcoming careers. You've made a fulfilling choice.