To Be Masterful

The thing I talk about least in my everyday life—the gurgling reality I forget about for large stretches of time until it bites me from behind—is the fact that I’m currently a graduate student. Yep, for the past year I’ve been pursuing a Master’s Degree in education from the illustrious Hunter College. Who knew, right?

I know what you’re thinking: But don’t you work close to 60 hours a week and also drink too much and write a self-indulgent blog? Yes: Hermione gave me her time-stopping clock in exchange for tips on how to style curly hair.

In a year, I will be highly masterful—a master, if you will. There are many perks to being a master: bragging rights, sword-fighting prowess, resume building and cold, hard cash. I chant these benefits in my head like I learned to do in yoga as I ride the train uptown on a Saturday morning at 8am, but somehow my brain doesn’t buy its own internal chanting.

In its current iteration, being a graduate student is an unpleasant necessity. So much so that I’ve disassociated my current experience with higher education in general so I can maintain images of grandeur, intellect and rigor should I decide to become a master twice over—doubly masterful. I don’t think of graduate school as graduate school; I think of it as sitting in an overly-air-conditioned room on 94^th and Park for eight hours at a time doodling on a handout. It’s just this weird thing that sometimes I have to do.

The most regrettable part of leaving Boston besides leaving my INCREDIBLE friends (see: “Beantown Break-Up” and envision the weekend of antagonism it caused) was leaving behind a fully-functional, brand-new Massachusetts teaching certificate. Though some states have reciprocity with Massachusetts, New York is not one of them (shoulda moved to Oklahoma). So here I am: writing a blog post at graduate school—about graduate school—during the second week of summer (that’s as meta as it is sad).

My school hired me under the stipulation that I concurrently pursue a master’s degree while teaching. That’s how Teach for America teachers get thrown in classrooms straight outta college with no real cred, least of all street. They agree to become masterful. The program is an offshoot of Hunter that works within the life of a full-time teacher to get all us under-the-table educators legal and legit. It pumps us with practical knowledge and distilled teaching strategies and spits us out spiffy and masterful in just under 24 months, upon completion of a shoddy dissertation. Really, it’s not a bad deal. In theory, I support the idea of a practical, inexpensive graduate school for young teachers who don’t have the time or money to do it in a more traditional way. But that doesn’t mean I like it. 

Again, intellectually, I can’t complain: The program is essentially paid for by my school, it requires little real effort, I can read New Yorker fiction during class and, in the grand scheme of things, the time commitment is minimal. But, like they occasionally do, my emotions have won out, stomping all over those intellectual arguments and turning me resentful, self-pitying and annoyed. The content is largely a dumbed-down repeat of last year; it eats up my Saturdays; it’s far away; it’s oftentimes insultingly simplistic; it’s impersonal. That felt good. 

I try and try to flip a cranial switch to get a mindset adjustment about the whole endeavor, but I think there’s a broken fuse up there (perhaps one of many). While I know it’s a good thing—in theory, intellectually, practically—I just can’t get behind it. And so I sit here, clockwatching and single-handedly confirming the theory that teachers make the worst students. I chew gum, I eye roll, I text message, I take 20-minute bathroom breaks where I wander around the building contemplating my existence. I fume internally. Everyone’s in the same boat. Graduate school is the perpetual last priority because we’re all too busy and tired to really care. Closing the achievement gap during the week makes it hard to want to learn to do it better on the weekends. Once I’m masterful, I know it’ll all be worth it, but for now I’d really rather be in Brooklyn—in my bed, at a bar, or both.