Another late blog anniversary update, but at least it’s still going.

Well, I’ve spent over half a decade writing this blog! God, has it really been that long? Well, it’s been a great run. Hope you folks enjoyed it. This is goodbye forever!

No, I’m kidding!

More work, less time

I’ve no intention of shutting this blog down. I still have tons of stuff to write about, but so little time to do it. My schedule this past summer has gotten really busy, especially since I’ve recently been hired full-time at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) as the “submarine supervisor” on USS Blueback.

Now I’m trapped in here full-time!

As prestigious as that title sounds, it basically means I’m the manager of operations on the submarine. My job is to oversee the staff and volunteers. I’m less of a submarine captain, and more of the guy who just makes sure the submarine doesn’t burn down and there’s not a big hole in the water where the boat used to be.

That said, the summer season has ended and we’ve transitioned into the post-Labor Day fall season, AKA dead season. Attendance to the museum drops precipitously during this period. So I work roughly 36 hours a week. (At the museum, 30+ hours a week is rated as Full Time Employment (FTE).) At least I get benefits and they’ll match retirement contributions. Things pick up again once the holidays roll around, then drop off again until Spring Break in March, then pick up again after Memorial Day for the summer season.

Leaving Education?

As I’ve hinted at in the last anniversary post, I’m strongly considering actually leaving the field of education. Here are some of my reasons:

  • Having worked on the submarine as a part-time employee for the past year, my transition into a full-time role has been much smoother and easier. However, there’s still a learning curve since I need to adjust to my additional duties and responsibilities.
    • Thankfully, the submarine has an extremely strong crew of paid employees and volunteers who do great work as tour guides. We have very high camaraderie and we’re focused on the submarine and sharing its history. (That said, it wasn’t always like that and I’ve heard horror stories of previous interpersonal conflicts with past tour guides. I just happened to join the crew when things had settled down and the COVID pandemic had gotten rid of a lot of the riff-raff.)
  • Working in a museum and on a museum ship has been a dream of mine and I’ve essentially achieved it. The atmosphere of a museum is more geared toward my personality and passion for naval history (even though it’s a science museum and I’m not a scientist).
  • One of the biggest issues I had with being a teacher is that I found it hard to mentally “buy into” the role and institution of education and teaching. While I’ve always valued education as an ideal and as a personal habit, the reality (i.e. how it’s done in practice) is what turns me off from it. My experience in the classroom as a licensed and contracted teacher, drove me to the conclusion that education is a broken, toxic, manipulative, and scatterbrained system that is more focused on political and social zeitgeists than it is on actually educating young people and preparing them for their futures.
  • Not only schools, but society itself has also failed to adequately raise the current generations of kids. The amount of misbehavior, disregulation, and lack of empathy, respect, and self-awareness displayed by the current Generation Z and Generation Alpha students is the nail that drove the coffin shut.
    • The fights, bullying, language, racial slurs, homophobic comments, etc. mean that teachers have to put out fires every day! It gets to the point where we get fed up and burned out. At the middle school I taught at, by the end of the 2021 – 2022 school year, about 40% of the staff (including me) left for various reasons! In my case (and many others) I was miserable and sick of dealing with these little brats…especially after we had just come back into the classroom after 18 months of COVID lockdown. As a result, I ended my year of teaching middle school quite bitter and upset. Simply put, I didn’t get paid enough to be insulted and abused by the very people I’m trying to serve.
    • Sadly, my generation (Millennials) has raised their children on screens and gentle parenting with no genuine consequences for their misbehavior. As a result, this manifests in the classroom, as well. While the previous parenting methods certainly had their problems, I feel that the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction in an attempt to rectify those issues. As a result, when in the classroom, the kids are so entitled, and bratty, and have no fear of repercussions since they don’t really face any. No wonder teachers are having so many mental health issues and trauma.
  • As a social studies-endorsed secondary school teacher, it’s very difficult for me to find jobs because social studies teachers are a dime a dozen. The subject has very low turnover at the high school level, and when there is a job opening, the school already knows who it’s hiring (it ain’t you 90% of the time). In contrast, subjects like Special Education (SPED), math, and science have the highest turnover rates of the subjects, so it’s relatively easy to find those types of jobs.
    • The problem is not only finding a job but seeing if the school is going to be a good fit. What’s the culture like at this school? What socioeconomic community does it serve? Why is there a job opening here? What’s the turnover rate at the school? (I’ve heard stories of schools with 90% annual staff turnover! Yes, really! Things must be hell at those schools.)

There are quite a number of other reasons, but I won’t go into them here. I once heard someone say that “education is a field that teachers love, but it doesn’t love them back.” Yep, I’d say that’s probably true. Put simply, I’m not convinced that there’s really a place for me in education. At one point, I may have wanted to be in the field and was willing to put in the work, but after seeing how agonizingly stressful it really was, I decided that my sanity wasn’t worth it.

All bitterness aside, I still have a current teaching license and I still plan to occasionally do substitute teaching for the foreseeable future. Basically, this is just as I’ve been doing for the past two years, but less of it since I’m working more on the submarine. And I plan on continuing only subbing for high schools because most high schoolers can actually form a full sentence and hold a conversation…most of the time.

Further Projects

Anyway, expect to see more submarine content in the coming years. However, I don’t want this blog to become solely submarine and Blueback-oriented. I still want to write about ships, technology, naval history, WWII, the Coast Guard, etc. So I’ll try to keep adding variety to the mix.