do i want to go to grad school??

I don’t know. I’ve gone back and forth on this, notably confirming my registration to take the GRE in Asuncion in October the day before talking to my sister and deciding that after all I don’t need to go to grad school. I figure I may as well take the exam while I can and decide the rest later. But later is fast approaching, as applications are due in January …..

I would like to know more about international community development, specifically in terms of poverty reduction in rural areas, education and teacher training, working with parents and the educational community, youth, health education, and democracy and civic culture. So there’s that at least. And it may be possible to get a job in these areas without a masters degree, though I’ve been told that for anything other than entry-level a masters is usually required. And yes, I do have my masters in Teaching of High School Social Studies, but that may not serve me in these kinds of jobs.

I think I have this vision of graduate school that will teach me all I want to know. When I started teaching in Brooklyn I was panicking, buying all sorts of books and signing up for all kinds of classes that would help me figure out what I was doing, but it turns out none of them could answer for me “How can I help Juan Morales learn?” How many hours, and dollars, did I spend looking for someone to give me an answer to that question?? In the end I just had to figure it out for myself the best I could. For all of my adult life I’ve taken jobs that I haven’t been qualified for and jumped in and did my best based on my intuition and hard work – grant writing and fundraising at City Year, teaching kids like Juan in a “challenging” urban environment, teaching English abroad, training elementary school teachers. And while that’s fun, and I wouldn’t trade any of these experiences for anything, I’d like to feel like a grown up, like I’m qualified to do my job, or at least that I’m not constantly making it up as I go along.

Of course, grad school may be just a bunch of theory that will end up annoying me. Mindy lent me some of her Economics of Developing Countries texts, and as I read them I end up a) skipping all the parts that have to do with math, which is a lot in an economics text, and b) annoyed with how disinterested and just WRONG the text is somehow. At one point the discussion was over how to define poverty, and one economist has written that based on calorie-intake per day you can determine if someone is living in poverty. That’s just ridiculous – in Paraguay the diet of the poorest families is very mandioca-heavy, and mandioca has a ton of calories but virtually no nutrients. So they end up with lots of calories but very few vitamins and minerals, by the book’s definition not poor but obviously in poor health with few resources. Granted, that’s just one economist in one text, and the idea of an education is not only to read theories you agree with, but what if I have to spend two years reading ridiculous things like that?? Do I even want to be back in the student lifestyle, reading and writing papers and such all the time? I have a hard time right now imagining myself doing anything other than drinking terere in the shade. Hmmmmmmmm