“I started teaching here just before Christmas of 2018. I was a substitute teacher in Illinois for the semester before that. I was still a new teacher. When I was in high school, [teaching] was one of the things I seriously considered, but I didn’t go in that direction. Then, I made this kind of mid-life career shift and at the time, it just seemed to me as the perfect intersection between my very, very, very, very few skills and interests, and it turned out to be just that. My only regret is that I didn’t start twenty years earlier. To me, the real world is the life of the mind, and the outside world of material objects is just an appendix to that and the experience of being with young people as they wake up to the joy that can be found in life and the mind is what gets me out of bed in the morning. That, and having to pee.”
