quasi-unemployed

So I got quasi-fired. Not to worry, though. I’ll be back at it in a couple of weeks, but what had happened was that I was going to teach a field trip class for these two last weeks of inter-semester vacation, and we didn’t have enough students to justify having two teachers there. And since the other teacher is full-time (and they have to pay her to do something), she got the gig. So I’m on vacation for the next couple of weeks. Yay!

Some of you may be wondering what I am doing with myself. Well. Today, I actually went on the field trip with the students. I mean, I’d prepped them for it, and I was pretty excited about it, so I just went. We went to the NC Capitol Building and the NC Museum of History. I also snuck out to hit up the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the NC Museum of Natural History. Good stuff. You don’t actually get to see a whole lot of Dead Sea Scrolls - just four or five fragments, but it’s really kind of cool to think that you’re looking at something that’s literally 2000 years old. I can’t really even begin to imagine how anything survives that length of time. But there they were. Little bits of scripture (and other writings) carefully penned on sheepskin scrolls in languages that are like a thousand years older than even the oldest English. Left in a jar in a cave somewhere just waiting to be discovered, restored and passed along, which was likely their original purpose anyway.

In a way, it kind of makes me sad that we can reproduce information so easily now. Don’t get me wrong, the printing press (and all its descendants) was, in my opinion, probably the best invention ever (indoor plumbing coming in a close second), but it just seems that taking the time to read and meticulously copy an entire book for the sake of future generations requires far more forethought, intentionality and just plain giving a crap than say…buying someone a gift card to Barnes and Noble. That is not to say that I want Pedro the Latino elf to bypass the B&N this Christmas. I just mean that we’ve made things so easy for ourselves now that they seem to have lost some meaning in the passing down from one generation to the next.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just feeling a tad sentimental having just spent the weekend at my family reunion, but I’m really jealous of the age before mass communications took over completely (but maybe after the invention of the printing press). When story-telling and playing music together and reading were the popular forms of entertainment. When siblings and cousins and neighbor kids wrote and put on elaborate theatrical productions for fun. When Marmee gathered us all by the fire to read the latest letter from Papa, who was off fighting the war, and Laurie would come over, and we would all go out for a walk together. And remember that time when Jo was curling Meg’s hair for the big night out, and she burned a lock off?! It was tragic, but oh how we did laugh! Sigh. Those were the days.

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