Law School on the Municipal Dime

September 5, 2008 in How to Get a Job, Personal Reflection
Tags: best, building, burnout, company, connections, degree, easy, famed, fired, for, frugal, highly, infamous, job, kentucky, law, male, network, offender, on, pay, paying, photography, presidency, programs, qualified, satisfied, school, sex, single, sometimes, states, student, study, sweet, taxpayers, tenure, track, union, united, way, work

I’m seriously considering law school. Not because I want to become a lawyer — Ambrose Pierce defined a lawyer as one skilled in the circumvention of the law, and I’d like to keep my soul intact — but more because I find fascinating the balance between tedious paperwork and long-winded decisions founded on purely hypothetical arguments. In other words, I’d like getting a law degree because I’d like the process.

At first, I wasn’t sure how I’m going to pay for it. Student loans are a racket, especially for law school, and the local law school doesn’t have much in the way of scholarships and grants. There are 83 units; each costs $750; the costs continue to increase every year.

Then it hit me: Teach.

Teaching is perfect for some future law student eyeing the five-year law program at the local school. The best part speaks for itself: teaching brings automatic pay raises typically after every 15 graduate units, typically up to a maximum of 60 units or higher. Further reasoning follows:

After just two years, when a teacher gets established and gets a routine going in the classroom, there needn’t be very much prep time spent outside the normal work day. After the same, concurrent two years of at least adequate service, that same teacher becomes tenured — you’d have to have sex with a student to get fired after that, and sometimes not even then.

After tenure and routine set in, more time is available in the weeknights and summers for law classes from that special five-year program. Even before tenure, all summers are wide open for the sake of teaching or taking summer school and, after taking these few units, teachers get yet another automatic pay raise. It’s a lucrative cycle for a young, frugal, single male with custody of zero children. The pay raises won’t completely cover law school, but they’ll make a sizeable dent.

I’m set to snag a position as soon as I’d want, mostly because my school photography company sends me to schools four days a week. On its dime, I can very easily start making connections throughout the better part of three counties, spreading the word with a well-placed business card — one highly qualified social science intern is all too ready for hire.

It’ll be hit and miss, mostly miss. I don’t mind — I need just one hit, one home run, and I’m perfectly satisfied to stick around my company until I make that fluke. Then, I’m set to re-enter the preliminary stage of a profession famed for militant unions and infamous for high burnout.

And why not? I’m not all that tired of teaching. After a year of training in front of a classroom and just as long theoretically learning about teaching as a credential student, I had only just begun to start. I would have continued it, too, if it hadn’t been for my meddling hubris.

I have all the time I need, and I’m in just the right position to make just the right move. My CSET scores are still good for a few more years, and, chances are, my existing units will more-or-less transfer. From here, it’s a matter of timing.

If nothing else, yet one more route to fame, fortune and the presidency of these United States just uncovered itself. Sweet.

You Get What You Pay For

August 2, 2008 in Darndest Things
Tags: album, amazing, anchors, armstrong, aweigh, band, banjo, castle, cheesy, coast guard, died, dollars, downloadable, drug, fanfare, for, free, generation, grace, greensleeves, honey, legal, louis, me, military, music, rap, record, recordings, review, so, space, taint, tax, taxpayers, they, walls, you

I like free music. Who doesn’t?

My unquenchable thirst for downloadable music — legal or questionably legal — took a strange turn when a friend turned me onto the archives of the United States military bands. The Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps bands all have their own websites and, because these bands are funded by the taxpayers, their recordings are free.

As far as I could find, our friends in the Coast Guard were left out. Please correct me if I’m wrong. I’ve been looking for a copy of their theme song — nine times catchier than Anchors Aweigh — to no avail.

Seven years of marching band in high school and in college well-prepared me for the huge collection of marches and patriotic music. Three hours later, I finished importing the complete John Phillips Sousa into iTunes. I don’t know who Colonel Bogey is, but he makes me smile.

I imagined military sanctions for band members.

Twenty push-ups for each missed chord change. Play through a rest means half-rations for a week. Talk during rehearsal? Court-martial.

Then it got weird.

Google gave me a link to the old Air Force archives, filled with recordings of our fighting men and women playing and singing music of all genres. Dixieland. New Wave. R&B. There was even a rap song.

It’s hard not to crack a smile at the idea of stoic, serious-faced officers playing the blues in their full dress blues, chiseled jaw and all.

I found all of these songs for free online. Most of them are cheesy.

Greensleeves
It almost sounds like a hillbilly cover of ‘Take Five’ before delving into the immediately-recognizable theme. Not too long after, it disintegrates into several Dawg-worthy solos.

Castle Walls
It starts out almost like Sympathy for the Devil — a song with an intro best described as a jungle samba — but this version is played down-tempo. And with bagpipes.

Amazing Grace
Featuring the thrift-store Enya knock-off.

Generation Drug-Free
Imagine government-funded rap about living your life drug-free. Imagine it worse.

The same thinking brought us a surprisingly credible version in ’80s rock form called High on Life. The more soulful Choices is almost as good.

Space Fanfare
You can steal something like eight consecutive melody notes before it’s legally plagiarism. Joseph Spaniola knew this, and wrote for us the Space Fanfare. It starts by almost quoting the Star Wars, Superman and Star Trek themes. It’s a downward spiral from there.

They Died for You, They Died for Me
Hey — did you hear? Vietnam was a fight for freedom, at least according to this Nashville-style Soft Rock. “They died for freedom, God and family/ They died for you/ They died for me,” attests the honkey-tonk crooner. Strangely enough, references to carpet bombing, conscription or the Gulf of Tonkin were cut from the final version.

‘Taint So, Honey ‘Taint So
A white man doing his best Louis Armstrong impression provides the lead vocals about halfway in — as you’d expect, it’s immediately singable. Everything in this album really isn’t that bad, though this is the only selection with such a gravely hoarseness to it.

Tax dollars well spent.