What are we going to do now?, redux

This is what it comes down to:

NOTICE OF RESIGNATION
Last Day of Service : ________________

Please tick your main reason for resignation:
(*Delete as appropriate.)

___ Better Prospects in Private Sector
___ No-Pay Leave Not Approved*Childcare/Accompany Spouse/PDL/Private Affairs
___ Join Independent School
___ Dissatisfied with Compensation & Benefits
___ Career Change
___ Dissatisfied with *Workload/Scope of Work
___ Lack of Career Development
___ Health reasons
___ Other Reason(s):

I confirm that the information given above for my resignation is correct.


_______________
Signature of Officer


________________________
Date of Notice of Resignation

Please note that interest will be charged for late settlement of any financial liabilities (eg. overpayment of salaries, liquidated damages, etc).

When I handed it to my boss, she started. "There's a form for it? You don't have to write a letter?"

Guess not.

* * *
I used to think I would write an irate letter when the day finally came: a letter filled with venomous diatribes against the misplaced priorities of the education system, coloured with sarcastic remarks about the empty Newspeak that has come to pass as professional dialogue and education development plans, concluding with self-righteous wounded disappointment at the demise of ideals and hope.

Instead, there's just this form.

What this form doesn't say: I've had a really good year working under someone whom I feel is a good boss. I really have had very little to complain about. I would recommend this place in a heartbeat to anyone that I thought would fit in and have as much fun as I've had. And the fact that this has been a great place to work has only made it harder for me to reach my decision to leave. Over and over this year, I've asked myself, "You sure you're going to quit? But you have it so good here --- good colleagues, the workload, good environment. You sure you want to give it all up?"

Yes. Yes, I am.

The workaday reason is this: I can't do the teaching thing anymore. Resuming the job, this year, something didn't sit right with me. I knew what needed to be done, how to get a class from point A to point B. But I struggled so much trying to think up ways that would engage them and help them to learn, and I wound up falling back on the me-talk-you-listen fashion (aka 'chalk and talk') that I was trying so desperately to avoid. Trying to plan lessons for each week soon hit a magnitude of difficulty on the order of planning a dinner menu with only fruit and salt in the fridge, or designing a wall mural with only white chalk and the ability to draw stick figures.

I suppose it didn't help that all around me I had colleagues with creativity oozing out their ears. I used to be like them; lesson planning used to be a cinch. But I've changed, I guess, and no matter how hard I try to retune my brain, I don't think that way anymore.

Now when you've got a teacher who can't teach and doesn't enjoy putting on the ol' song-and-dance routine in the classroom anymore, well, maybe that teacher shouldn't be teaching then.

* * *
As for the other reason I'm leaving, I can only quote Alfian Sa'at again: "If you care too much about Singapore, first it'll break your spirit, and finally it will break your heart." The casino "debate". The bloggers punished for "sedition". The "relocation" of Hock Kee House residents. The imminent demise of Geylang Serai. And all just this year.

I've been on the inside too. I've seen what I've seen and I've done what I've done. They get the job done, I'll give 'em that, but it's a job I want no part of, here on out. There are plenty of technocrats to take my place anyway. They won't miss me.

My parents have always said, "Change the system from within." I think I believed them, for a while. But I can't change a system when its fundamentals are so alien and divorced from my own. There is no basis for dialogue or discussion. Stay and be co-opted? I don't want that on my gravestone. Life, is elsewhere.

* * *
So here I go, into the blue. No new job yet, though feelers and resumes have been sent out. Friends have been extraordinarily supportive (thank you) and family --- uh, I haven't told my parents yet. I'm hoping to wait till the last possible moment, in the hope that I'll have a job offer by then to allay what I imagine will be their understandable concern about me striking out like this, at the age when they were having their first child (coincidentally, me).

I did blog about this some time ago, in a deliberately vague fashion, because it wasn't exactly public news then and I was in that uniquely bloggery quandary of wanting to blog about something, but not wanting the wrong people (i.e. people I hadn't told myself) to hear about it from my blog somehow. And then it turned out that some students read my blog, so I shied away from the subject altogether, because I didn't want them to think they were the reason I was quitting. (They're not, but a lot of things can be misconstrued over the internet.)

But people know, now. I was even able to coolly discuss it today with a colleague I hardly know, which then elicited, unsolicited, his remark that he would probably leave too, after a couple of years, to go see what else is out there. Other colleagues in the know have been wondering if I was really going to go through with it and I kept making jokes about reminding myself to submit my resignation letter before the end of November. But there's been no doubt in my mind. I'm good to go.

So I handed in my form to the boss today, which I suppose puts paid to any speculation that I might still be around in the new school year, and we had a really good conversation, as we always do. And then I walked out of her office, thinking, "So this is what it feels like to quit your job."

I usually end these self-indulgent maunderings with a Buffy quote:

Wesley: You need a strategy.
Buffy: I have a strategy. You're not in it.
Wesley: This is mutiny.
Buffy: (long pause) I like to think of it as --- graduation.

--- "Graduation Day Part 1", Buffy the Vampire Slayer

That works. But just this once, I'd like to end instead with something that I saw on an ex-student's blog recently:

"tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

That, my friends, is the most precious question of them all.

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