Happy August, dear readers, and Happy National Golf Month! At my house, we are celebrating by throwing our 5 and 6 hybrids into a giant fire and scrawling THREE PUTT into our forearms with animal teeth. But I've also heard you can decorate your cart with a little magnet! If neither of those will do, there is always much reading, watching, and listening I can recommend, of course—just scroll and ignore the small, murderous voice of your short game in favor of some great books.

What I'm reading

The Bright Sword, Lev Grossman

Look, I'm aware we don't necessarily need another King Arthur story, but I'll be a Bachelorette contestant before I let something as uppity as need get in the way of my literary purchases, thank you. The Bright Sword is good. Quite good. It's set in the power vacuum that forms after Arthur's death, and it follows a young and somewhat bumbling Sir Collum. He's trying to join the Round Table, which, after the bloodbath that killed Arthur, now consists of four or five second-stringers pouring wine directly into their armor-holes every night.

Is this the best Arthurian tale ever written? No. That is The Mists of Avalon. Is this the best Arthurian tale since The Mists of Avalon that does not contain Clive Owen smoldering his way through a major motion picture? Yes! And I think it would make for some perfect end-of-summer reading for you, my chivalrous friends.

What I'm watching

Billy and Dom Eat the World, Amazon Prime

Longtime readers will recall that I have been engaged in a parasocial relationship with Dom Monaghan and Billy Boyd for most of my life. It started with my first viewing of The Fellowship of the Ring at the tender age of 18, and it did not end with Billy and Dom's delightful COVID-era podcast, The Friendship Onion, ON WHICH I LEFT A VOICEMAIL AND RECEIVED AN ON-AIR RESPONSE.

It's not ending with Billy and Dom Eat the World, either, a TV spinoff from the best segment of the podcast—the hobbits eating food sent in by listeners—and it's wonderful. Billy and Dom are just so warm and positive and joyful I can't take it. It's the LOTR DVD extras all over again. Watch and age ten years in reverse. You'll see!

What I'm listening to

Good Hang with Amy Poehler, "Adam Scott," Paper Kite Productions

SHE'S STARTING THE REUNION YOU GUYS. I recommend any and all episodes of Amy Poehler's lovely, funny, generous podcast, Good Hang with Amy Poehler, but this run of Parks and Rec alumni is unreal. It's Adam Scott, people! Ben Wyatt!! They talk behind the scenes things and also comedy and also just being together and it is wonderful. A spoonful of honey for the ears.

What I'm thinking about

I can't be certain, but I'm guessing I'm thinking about teaching freshmen.

Now, typically, I do know what I am thinking about in this section; it is whatever is on my mind in the twelve to twenty-four hours before I hit send. For August, however, I had to write this newsletter two weeks in advance because I took a teaching job. Not a real one. Just a brief leave for a good friend, and so if all has gone well, right now I'm standing in an English 9 classroom, parrying the slings and arrows of Labor Day Eve with a shield of grammatical justice, like Captain America only in sensible block heels.

If all has not gone well, I'm already dead, and you may read this issue aloud at my funeral.

It's hard to say which it will be, as I type this. I've been in to observe the kids a couple of times, but all I learned was that kids are pretty much the same as they've always been: they like to be liked, they don't love to be quiet, and they see chairs more as obstacles to overcome than as tools to facilitate sitting.

What I'm nervous about, of course, is whether I am the same. I've been out of the game for five years. FIVE. That's more than four! I've grown accustomed to working at home, wearing slub-knit t-shirts and using the restroom at my leisure. Do I still have the fortitude to run a classroom, much less someone else's classroom? Do I remember how to handle kids shouting out YouTube catchphrases, hiding iPads under toilets, sneaking 32-ounce jars of peanut butter inside their sweatshirts? Or have the years of the peace and quiet made me soft—a pale, spreadable imitation of the pedagogical force I once was?

Am I I Can't Believe It's Not Butter?

Maybe that sounds ridiculous, but have you had the stuff? Put it on some cinnamon-raisin toast and really, you can't believe it. And only 60 calories per serving! Also, have you ever taken an extended leave teaching position? Well, I have. I took one when I was a brand new baby teacher with hope in her eyes and a Backstreet Boys song in her heart, and it was a formative experience. And by formative, I mean it was a bloodbath.

How did you think I got these scars? Knife fights in medium security prison? Velociraptor training? Wrong. I got them from a 6-week sub job in the spring of 2006, my first real teaching gig ever, and by Memorial Day I would have been happy with a power outage at either my local prison or my local dinosaur park. Oh, it was bad. The room was out of control and I was out of ideas. I'd burned through everything I learned in college in a single, frenetic lesson, and there was nothing left to do but kick kids out of class. Admin was exhausted. Students were checked out. Everything I said, wrote, or assigned the kids hated, but above all, they hated me.

Oh yes, those kids hated me. ME! They could not have hated me more if I'd shot the school mascot in front of them, and all I ever did to deserve it was be a terrible teacher for the entire six weeks we were together. The audacity. Did they have no imaginations? Could they not see the perfectly okay teacher I would one day become?

To be fair, I couldn't see it, either. In my final days of that maternity leave job, I applied to a graduate program to become a speech/language pathologist. Two or three students at a time, I told people. I can handle two or three at a time. I cannot teach an entire class of middle schoolers because it is impossible to teach an entire class of middle schoolers. God himself could not teach an entire class of middle schoolers. I will not defy the laws of the universe again.

So, yeah, I'm thinking about that experience today. I'm also thinking about a few years afterward, when I was, of course, teaching entire classes of middle schoolers. My dad, a lifelong educator, had talked me off the grad school ledge, and I was thriving, changing lives one student at a time, etc., etc. The teacher next door to me, however, was not. She was a brand new baby teacher, and while I wouldn't call her classroom a bloodbath, it was certainly a blood handwashing station. She told me she was starting to wonder if she'd chosen the wrong career.

On Labor Day weekend, something (God himself, perhaps, on his prep period) compelled me to send her an email. I told her about the sub job of despair. I said I remembered what it was like to dread coming in to school after a few days off. I told her that sick feeling in her stomach on Sunday nights was a universal new teacher experience, that it would get better, that her classroom was getting better—subtly, too subtly to notice until December, when she would turn around and realize people were learning in here, for Pete's sake—day by day. I told her I wanted to quit once, too. I told her to be nice to the school mascot. And I told her she definitely shouldn't quit.

I'm thinking about how, when we returned on Tuesday, she said my email convinced her to come back. And I'm thinking about how I had similar conversations with a handful of new teachers over the years. Especially later in my career, when mid-year absences became more common. Everyone seemed to be getting their foot in the door with an extended sub job or a temporary contract, but the door kept slamming on their ankles.

That was my time to shine. You think these kids don't like you? I'd say. Come. Let me tell you a story.

What matters to me today, a week or so before I get back into the classroom, is thinking about what that horrible sub job gave me. It gave me street cred. It gave me a lifelong upward comparison. And it gave me empathy. I didn't get to be a helpful mentor teacher without having been a miserable, brow-beaten newbie teacher. Who wants advice from someone to whom everything has come easily? Who even wants to talk to her?

In that spirit, I will tell you that I am a bit nervous about taking this job. But in my wiser moments, I'm also reassured that even if it goes poorly, I'll get some good content out of it. And maybe some decent advice.

I've probably forgotten that this newsletter goes out today. Once I start teaching, I will probably forget it exists entirely, along with all of my hobbies and most of my immediate family. Don't be surprised to see my kids turn up at school without socks, or standing in fields trying to coax birds of prey into hunting for them. In any case, I hope this hits both you and me exactly where we need it, which is probably somewhere in the lower leg.

Writing updates

When I finish teaching, I have plans to review Martha Stewart's Entertaining, which I just bought used on Thriftbooks for twice the price as the new updated edition I did not realize was coming out in October. Who would want such a thing I don't know, but I'm writing it, and there's nothing you can do to stop me.

The novel is somewhere in there, too, but again, I'm kind of thinking I haven't worked on that for a few weeks. Don't worry! Nobody can stop me from finishing this book! Except for me, probably, but I'm not afraid of me. I'm just a stick of margarine.

See you next month, unless I'm dead, and then I'll see you in some sort of mediumship situation! Either way, support public schools!!

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113 Cherry St #92768, Seattle, WA, 98104-2205