Sabbatical 4

I think the picture for this blog on the front page is by Adrian Tomine but can’t find the credit from where I got it

It’s hard to believe I’ve been on this break a whole month now. Well, it was hard. And then came my first proper payday without a paycheque and it suddenly became a lot easier to believe. In a way though, opting for the massive pay-cut of my unemployment hitting our family finances right now has made the cost-of-living crisis slightly easier to bear. We knew we would have less money this autumn than we did last year, we knew we would have to make cuts and things would be hard, so we were prepared for it. Whereas if we had not been thinking about this happening anyway it would all be a massive shock seeing the bills rising each month and the value of the pound plummeting each hour as our new Prime Minister and her ideology-blinded Chancellor make error after error. It really is feeling like we’re spiralling down into some pretty dire times - amazing really considering I thought we’d already plumbed the depths of how low we could go both politically and economically these last few years. And the added bonus of potential nuclear war thanks to Putin playing the Donald Trump card and threatening annihilation every few days adds an even grimmer frisson to the era. As I said on Twitter earlier in the week: “What a time to be alive. Maybe, even, the last time if things keep moving in this direction”.

I might just be feeling gloomy though because my car failed its MOT on Monday. Quite unexpectedly as it’s only a few years old (the car, not the MOT. It’s its first MOT). Apparently though, there is major damage to the shock absorber; it’s leaking fluid and in need of urgent repair. As repairs can’t happen until next week and the MOT ran out yesterday, it has meant that my car is now grounded for the job interview I have today (yes - I got the interview for the job I really want!) and I will have to make other arrangements to get there. I’m already out £200 on the car because earlier in the summer, a few days before our multi-week road trip in the car around Scotland, my next-door neighbour and his mate accidentally smashed the driver-side wing mirror with an ill-placed basketball. The urgency of getting it fixed in time for the trip meant having to pay a fairly high amount for the repair - £262 - at the only place that could guarantee to get the job done before we needed the car for our trip, but the kid who broke it wouldn’t pay for what he broke because he had a granddad who would have fixed it for £50 if we hadn’t been going away. I know. Because of some counterfactual fantasy world where this imaginary cheap repair happened, he and his parents refused to pay for the actual cost of the actual repair in this actual world as it actually happened and where it was really needed because of his careless destruction of our property. And what they did eventually contribute to the cost - the £62, negotiated up from the initial £50 they were willing to pay - was only paid this week, nearly two months after it all happened. Considering the car is on borrowed time anyway if I don’t get a new job soon (I don’t really need it if I’m not going anywhere regularly, and its lease is almost up), it is deeply annoying (especially with no income) to have to fork out for these repeated repairs. It has also somewhat soured my relationship with the neighbours. They’re a lovely family, and we’ve always got on with them. We’ve never minded their son constantly playing basketball in his driveway, even though his ball frequently smashes into our driveway - our house, our windows and our cars. We’ve hoped he’ll get good enough to control the ball better eventually, and kind of want him to become a professional player one day (it’s nice seeing someone with such passion for something), but we also always assumed that if anything got damaged, they’d take responsibility and pay for it. Apparently not. So now when I see him out there playing basketball, and the ball smashes into our cars (including multiple times bouncing under them and ricocheting violently around…maybe damaging the shock absorbers, for example) I am getting to the point where I worry we’re going to have to start being assholes and use words like ‘trespassing’ and ‘vandalism’ if he continues to do it. Obviously we don’t want to do that, but if a smashed window is treated the way our car was, or the car gets damaged again and the same lack of concern (and lack go payment for the breakage) ensues, it feels a bit ‘fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me’ for just letting him continue without any consequence.

So yeah - it’s been a gripey kind of week. The sky is falling, any money I earned last week is doomed to go straight back into car repairs, and the weather has gotten cold and wet; an autumnal chill is finally in the air. But it’s not all doom and gloom: like I said - I have a job interview today for the job I really hope I get and am really excited about. Of course, being me, I am also convinced I won’t get it, and all the excitement will end up being for nothing, and I am also obsessing about it and not just leaving it be until Friday. I have, of course, had to plan a lesson for the interview, which has taken up some time, but it’s just the mental space taken up by the whole anxiety-inducing will they/won’t they narrative in my head that gets louder and louder as the day looms closer. I’d almost rather they called me an hour before the interview and just asked me to throw a suit on and come down and improvise a lesson on the fly than give me a week to fret about it. My fingers are cramping from their being crossed for so long, but hopefully it all goes well today. If it does, all the mental energy this week will have been worth it. If it doesn’t, then I’ll have all that extra time in January when I now won’t be working for them in which to catch up with all the stuff I didn’t get done this week. So it’s win-win!

Luckily, the odd bit of middle of the night insomnia has also inspired another one of my shitty cartoons:

I’m really enjoying drawing these things and like challenging myself with using different techniques (although you maybe wouldn’t know it from looking at them!)

I’ve also had plenty of other stuff to take my mind off the worry, hope and neurosis of an impending job interview. Monday morning, before the bad news about the MOT, I met up for a lovely walk with my old Philosophy A-level teacher for a walk around Baddesley Clinton and a coffee. We caught up and shared stories of the summer and what we’d been up to since our last National Trust parlay at Charlecote Park earlier in the year and, as always, got in some good philosophy, putting the world to rights, as we did. We also seem to have accidentally gatecrashed a documentary film some people were making at a nearby church, not realising they were filming as we walked in and talked about how lovely the stained glass with. So if you’re ever watching some film about a treasure hunt for truth that leads some well-meaning Christians to a Warwickshire bible and hear mysterious voices in the background remarking on the beautiful colours, that’s us.

As well as catching up with old mentors and enjoying some car trouble, there was also some fun philosophy-based zoom action this week, with Tuesday afternoon seeing another meeting of the fledgling Association for Philosophy Teachers as we started sorting out next year’s conference with full gusto and discussed potential workshops we’d like to see/organise for the event, as well as starting conversations around formalising a mission statement and legal status for the group. Then on Wednesday afternoon I recorded my first episode of the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast for the new academic year - this time on epistemology instead of ethics, as all the other ones have focused on. I had a great chat with Simon Kirchin and Michael Lacewing about direct and indirect realism, as well as Berkeley’s idealism. I think it was a great episode - we somehow managed to boil down what is usually about a term’s worth of teaching into a compelling narrative discourse over about ninety minutes and had fun while doing it. As I say on the podcast - I always love with teaching epistemology (and metaphysics of mind) how completely influenced I can end up being from my students and change my position on what we can/can’t know or what a mind is/isn’t almost year-to-year. When the podcast comes out in a few weeks you can tune in to see what side of the epistemology of perception divide I fell onto this time. And I can guarantee that if you’re ever in my A-level classroom again in future, the answer might well be different by then.

Wednesday I also managed to bag another one-off teaching gig for next week and look forward to teaching a session online for the start of Black History Month on bell hooks. hooks is part of the inspiration for the capital N in my written name, but beside her feminist theory she has also had a huge impact on my approach to pedagogy. Often people see a website like this - with all the honesty and self-revealing stuff - and might think it unprofessional for a teacher to have. I disagree, and point you to some of hook's’ wisdom when she says in her exceptional, Teaching to Transgress: ‘teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualisation that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students.’ I would also point to the same book as part of the inspiration for what I’m doing right now: ‘I wish institutions would understand that teachers need time away from teaching, and that time away from teaching is not always a year sabbatical where you’re busting your ass to write a book, but that time away from teaching might be two years, or three. With the kind of job crisis we’re in, and I think if somebody can afford to take a leave without pay for two years or three years, and somebody else can have the job who doesn’t have a job - why isn’t that encouraged?’' hooks’ book was one of the things earlier this year which added to the growing disillusionment I was feeling towards my planned future in academia. Re-reading Teaching to Transgress around April I was struck by the joy she found in the classroom even as she railed against the institution of the university, and it was the first time I regretted handing in my notice as I began to face the reality of a September without a classroom for the first time in so long. But she also, in that last passage I quoted, reminded me that taking time away and just being me for a bit isn’t a bad thing or a counter-productive thing. In fact it is good teaching practice and necessary for the sort of self-actualisation a good teacher needs. I don’t have the savings for two to three years away, and if all goes well at today’s interview I will hopefully be back in a classroom by January - but four months off (six if you include the summer) is revitalising enough. I already feel eager to teach and I’m only three months down. In fact, if the interview goes poorly, at least I got to teach a lesson this week - and having this additional lesson to teach next week means the blow of rejection, if it comes, won’t be so soul-crushing. There is still a future in a classroom somewhere. Or, as Joni Mitchell famously put it: ‘you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone’.

So yeah - this week has been very much all over the place and THE BIG RESEARCH AND WRITING PROJECT has taken a definite hit in the process, but I’m not mad about it. I also plan on spending most of the rest of today getting back to it. As hooks said - I shouldn’t bust my ass to write a book. I’m writing two but, like Dolores Claiborne, I’ll take my time. I won’t be hurried. I’ll do it my way. Ayuh - but with less of a Maine accent. (That one was for the constant readers out there).

Of course I’ve also indulged in the fun stuff of life this week too, and it isn’t all work, work, work. There’s the usual playlist of the week:

And I think I’ve watched more football in the last week than I previously have in an entire adult lifetime after discovering that the AVWFC matches away are all streamed for free on the FA Player app. We watched the Tottenham v Arsenal match on the BBC on Saturday, then the Villa v Leicester match on the player on Sunday, plus watched the Women’s Football Show on Monday and listened to the Guardian’s WSL podcast. Not to mention - continuing the sporty theme - enjoying Saturday’s random Red Sox vs Yankees game streamed free on BBC Sport. Considering cutting my annual MLB TV package is one of the cost-saving measures of unemployment, it’s nice to hear the Beeb are planning on screening more baseball going forward. Hopefully the Red Sox might even be good again by next season! On top of all the wrestling hijinks of AEW’s Grand Slam Rampage episode, it was a very passively physical weekend where I don’t think we watched anything that wasn’t sports or sports-adjacent; something I could never imagine being true of me about ten years ago. If my dad could see me now he wouldn’t recognise me, but he’d be proud.

And, yes, we went to the cinema to watch Don’t Worry Darling. My review for you if you’re planning on going to see it yourself soon: don’t. Only joking, but also sort of not. It was an objectively terrible movie with some of the worst writing and biggest plot-holes I’ve seen for a long time. However - neither my wife nor I have stopped thinking about it since. It is bad, but it is compelling. Like a Twilight Zone episode you’ve already seen a million times - a bad Twilight Zone episode - but that won’t quite leave you alone. So do - you’ll wish you didn’t, you’ll never get the time back, but you also won’t really regret it either.

Tonight - win or lose on the job front - we have tickets for the Birmingham Improv Festival at the MAC. It’s so cool to see this event blossom into something so big after its early origins at the Blue Orange Theatre. Believe it or not, I was on the organising committee for the first one. I actually ran the website for it! We performed there too. It’s sad not to be part of that scene anymore - a casualty of the pandemic - but I look forward to seeing some great shows as a spectator. And who knows - the itch might start again to get involved. Improv and me have a weird relationship. After doing it constantly throughout university and my postgraduate years, I went cold turkey until I started teaching and then found it again. Did it for years, and then stopped when covid closed all the pubs and venues. Then this summer I taught it again to kids at my old school and remembered how fantastic it is. Who knows. I guess the joy is that I’ll have to improvise my next steps with improv.

Anyway - I can’t believe with everything going on this week I’ve had time to do one of these. Never underestimate the power of a random promise made to oneself.

Now go away and wish me luck for the interview!