a letter to myself two years ago

(ok, i'm going a little jonathan swift on you here... it's not all bad, but once i opened the window and started going, this is what came out.)

Dear Future Ms. P.G.,

While you may think that teaching English to urban youth is your life's calling, please do not take yourself or your ambition too seriously. Once you finally achieve this goal, you will find that it is essentially a joke. Your expectations are so far from reality that you may as well be thinking about an entirely different person's life. Forget everything now. Forget your visions of inculcating your students with The Truth - they will be too busy trying to tear the classroom apart and incite each other to mortal combat (or, alternately, too deeply asleep) to listen. Forget your naive allegiance to the tenets of a student-centered classroom and the laughable, kumbayah ethics of progressive education. And most importantly, forget yourself. Forget all of the moments you spent, yourself a high school student trudging through a thousand dreary assignments, knowing that It Could Be So Much Better than This - your own adolescence was a paragon of opportunity that the students you will come to teach would feign recognize as a high school education, mistaking it rather for a somewhat rigorous engagement at an underfunded country club. Forget all else except the blessed miracle of time's forward movement which will inevitably deliver you to the end of the day - lo, even to the far-off paradise of a Friday afternoon - for this and your own meager wits are all that will sustain you.

But do not be discouraged. Despite the near-total apathy of your students, the complete incompetence of the administration and your own lack of preparation, you will find allies in your coworkers, with whom you will carp endlessly during lunch hours. You will also find succor in the tremendous amounts of coffee you consume daily, and in the glasses of wine that await at a day's end. And, at the very least, at least you aren't selling pussy dye.

Please heed this advice as well as one's previous self, bound by temporal causality, can - your very sanity depends upon it.

Sincerely,
Present Ms. P.G.