Maintain This Velocity Until Further Notice

After a great week at school I'm flush with enthusiasm, and more afraid of cockiness costing me what I've worked for than I am of failing for any lack of ability or worth ethic. I have to remember that my success so far this school year hasn't come primarily from my being good or super-smart, but rather that I got here by working to the best of my abilities with what I was given. It's only when I start assuming that my talents are great enough to let me coast through with less than 100% effort that I don't accomplish my goals. This is something it has taken me literally 30 years to learn, but I don't doubt it for a second.

I find myself in a position where it is so tempting to slack off, I may have to go way overboard in the other direction to compensate. I've been thinking of volunteering to tutor Principles of Microeconomics students just to have the opportunity to reactivate some of the long-dormant economic intuition in my head. I felt great about studying with my peers for a test in my hardest class recently, and studying with the group paid off more than it has for me in the past as well - I got a solid A on the test. Working with my peers (outside of my many experiences as a wage slave in food service) is strangely unexplored territory for me. I expect that there is a lot for me to gain from and learn about working with my fellow students towards shared goals more abstract than making it through the lunch rush, like mastery of a subject or exploration of an idea. On top of it all, I'm enjoying making new friends with people who share some of the intellectual fascinations that grip me. A lot of the value I'm getting from those friendships currently is linked to the encouragement to succeed in school, however, and the more comfortable I get with them as friends the more trouble I think I may have treating time with them as a study aid.

Graduate school, once the punchline to a joke about how I didn't want to spend my life, is now something I'm strongly considering. Even more surprising, I'm considering what attracts people to the college lifestyle in the long-term and wondering if teaching at the college level isn't the career for me after all. Teaching economics is the most fun thing anyone's likely to ever offer to pay me to do, so I shouldn't brush it off lightly the way I did back in 2005 when I was offered a position as a tutor in the Economics department at my school. At the time, working with people who understood less than me was the last thing I wanted to do with my time. Nowadays, spending time with people who want to learn as much as I do sounds incredible at any price, and the idea of being paid for it is unquestionably appealing.