The Academy of Unfrumpy Winter Boots

I've been thinking.

 I turn twenty five on the fourteenth of next month. By twenty six I will have a Bachelors of Arts in English - a combined honors in Creative Writing and English Literature- and a Masters degree in Creative Writing. As I leave the academic sphere next year I also prepare to enter it as a teacher. Upon graduating I intend to get my TESOL training next year and teach English and perhaps Theater. With my enormous student loan, I am aware of how much and how quickly I need to make money and in order to be considered for a highly sought after job at one of the English CEGEPs in Montreal, I need experience. I would love to do some backpacking but considering my debt, the only way I can do any travelling is to find move somewhere I'd like to explore and work there for a while. It is therefore a happy coincidence that my boyfriend grew up in Malaysia and has family there still. I spent a month there last Christmas and am looking into what it takes to get hired at the International school he went to. I have always wanted to travel through Asia and am excited about getting my feet wet in front of a classroom overseas. In Kuala Lumpur we can teach summer classes of our own devising and get experience in front of a class while we look for TESOL jobs or editing/publishing position. Eventually we will return to Montreal in hopes of teaching at the CEGEP level and maybe thinking about PHDs, but later. Now, I'd like to enjoy my first foray into life outside of school. With the exception of one year after high school I will  have been in the Academic system for nineteen of my twenty four years on this precious planet of ours. I want the chance to miss it a little.

So, as I prepare to both flee and embrace Academia, it is exciting to have discovered the Hook and Eye blog. I was directed to them - them being the witty women who write the blog Heather Zwicker, Aimée Morrison and Erin Wunker - by my Professor of Canadian Literature. She enthused to us about this blog and for once an internet recommendation truly was as good as it was made to sound. These women are eloquent, honest academics and they're a pleasure to read. They describe themselves as:

"Hook & Eye is an intervention and an invitation: we write about the realities of being women working in the Canadian university system. We muse about everything from gender inequities and how tenure works, to finding unfrumpy winter boots, decent childcare, and managing life's minutiae. Ambitious? Obviously. We're women in the academy."

These women are fascinating. They speak the language of the internet generation fluently and write about it agelessly. “The consolation is that everybody's in the same straits, and if facebook can be believed (and, really, when can't it?), there is a kind of pleasure in sharing this particular misery,” wrote Heather Zwicker.  I feel a connection to these women. They are women who have worked hard to situate themselves in the academic sphere and are deeply tired of the inequality that surrounds them despite our modern age. I was raised by two feminists. My mother and father are both social workers and both artists and they instilled in me not the Disney mantra that anything is possible if you wish really, really hard, but that I am a capable, sufficient, talented individual and my gender should not dictate my role in society. I decided in grade nine that I wanted to be a teacher because, surprise, surprise, I had a teacher that influenced me in a deeply positive way and altered my approach to and opinion of school. He affected the way I approached literature and writing, he made the class engaging and appealing and promoted creativity within our writing by implementing it in his lesson plan. I knew then that I wanted to be involved with education and eleven years later I am only beginning to understand how extensive the process is. Reading about the challenges my role models continue to face is intimidating and edifying. I intend to check in with them frequently as I explore the unfamiliar territory that is Canadian pedagogy.

If you care to check out the blog,  click here: http://www.hookandeye.ca/p/editorial-policy.html