Getting Through Just One Year

frankcritic · Posted: Mon May 12, 2008 1:43 am Post subject:

One year of my life will determine what the rest of them will be like.

I've got to get through student teaching for that year and after that I can have my teacher's license and be able to go anywhere and work anywhere. Until I get my license though, I'm still a guy on the higher end of his 20s with no job experience and too much education for his own good. In this and any other market, it spells doom. Oh, I can get a job. Keeping a job on the other hand, that's a whole other thing. Probably due to problems with being an aspie. Teaching I'm good enough at that I think I could keep it. The social element, the game, all that sort of thing though, it could wreck it and I'll never be more vulnerable than when I'm student teaching. Always around the same person with whom I'll work closely and be expected to be completely subordinate to. It's a recipe for disaster.

Based on what I've read about social skills development, the gist of it is that you pretend to be normal. You give a grand performance, an act that serves to mask your true personality to your coworkers and superiors in a way that will not alienate them. What is involved in this sounds truly hellish to me, but I've got no choice. Like all social situations, I view this upcoming experience with utter contempt and dread. For NTs, social interactions are just a symphony of lies. I don't even know why people tell their children not to lie, because it's a basic social skill, perhaps the basic social skill. The more developed and undetectable your lying, the more popular you will be, the more friends you will have, and the better you will be at the game.

My plan, as it stands currently is the following. Never contradict a teacher, never demonstrate greater knowledge on a given subject than a teacher, never speak to a teacher without being spoken to first, be doing work whenever possible even if just to look busy, and when you finally do get your own class to teach with the teacher watching still, do everything precisely how you have been instructed to, precisely how the teacher would do it, and if reprimanded ask what to do differently and do that without variance. Remember, you are not being paid to think, show initiative, or exercise free will. Actually, you're not being paid period, but never mind. You are being paid nothing to follow orders and demonstrate ability to carry them out as instructed. This may be refined with my weekly therapy sessions to make sure I get through this thing, but the plan here seems as low risk as possible.

-Frank