In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.
Welcome back.
My job is pretty tough. I do
not teach in a nice place with wonderful working conditions.
Many of the students I teach want to be thugs
and criminals, few want to learn, and of those few they follow the T&S loud-crowd.
I get cussed out everyday.
So do the other teachers. The
profanity does not bother me so much, although it can be quite
tiresome at times. It is the incessant, militant
hostility to my role as a teacher that wears me down.
My students hate teachers, learning, and school. They utter to my peers and me all the nasty,
threatening, mean, and disrespectful verbage they have wanted to say to
traditional public school teachers with no consequences.
If some of them can get a
teacher to cry or quit, they have had a good day.
Worse still is the incessant violation of rules. Couple that with students ignoring teacher
directions and you have a frustrating environment for professional educators.
Students are loud, restive, angry, hungry, and oppositional at every turn.
I use humor to make it through the day. Most other teachers quit. The ones who stay do the best they can with
grinding resolve.
I wonder sometimes if all the stress is not affecting my
sleep. I have been perturbed of late with
an irrational fear that popped into my head.
Recently, I memorized Poe's poem, “The Raven.” I did it for a kick and because I wanted to
know if my memory is okay at my age.
Every day I have been reciting “The Raven,” and other poems, just
to keep them all fresh in my mind. I
never know when I might be called upon to recite a poem that I teach.
Indeed, at the school where I teach now, I often recite a poem
when one my students starts rapping about drugs, sex, and lock and load.
I do not recall if this irrational fear came to me in a dream or
in an indelible impression, but somehow an idea got into my head that if I ever
recited "The Raven" word for word, without a mistake, then I would
drop dead.
This irrational fear has been in the back of my mind for weeks
now.
Naturally, I began working really hard to recite “The Raven” word
for word, perfectly, with no mistakes or mispronunciations just to prove the irrational fear is nonsense.
Of course, I did not drop dead when I did recite it. Obviously…
Nor did I die that day.
Obviously…
That is how an irrational fear comes to us, as something
impossible to attain. Often an
irrational fear comes with a sensed ritual built into it and a feeling of
disaster or great reward to follow if the ritual is executed perfectly.
But it is merely an irrational fear. The content has no affect on the natural
world of my organs whatsoever. It is not
efficacious in my physiology in the sense that reciting the poem would have
ever killed me.
If I had died, it would have been an unfortunate coincidence. Now, those are real.
Since I, obviously, did not die, what happened next? My mind began to play another trick on me.
Questions began to emerge.
Did I really recite the poem flawlessly? Did I?
Moreover, a suggestion that there are different versions of the
poem occurred to me.
So now I must find the original version that Poe printed in The American Review in 1945?
For me, such an exercise would be a waste of time. I know the end result would be that I wasted my time after I took the time to find the original poem and then recited it or any version of the "The Raven" perfectly and did not die.
I know this because there is no supernatural menace in the
world. That impression comes from my
brain. What triggered it? Stress?
Getting older? The holidays are
coming?
Who knows? Whatever the
answer, it lays within this natural world and the explanation will come from
sound psychology not superstitious doctrines.
Blessings...
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