Jared Hall Garland

Substitute Teaching: a Book of Aimless Haiku and Wandering Thought Jared Hall Garland 1. izdevums

The book you currently hold in your hands is all that remains of what could have been an illustrious career in the field of education. Instead, it ended with a somewhat disillusioned twenty-something trying to find a reason for ever having wanted to teach in the first place. "What could be born out of this apparent disillusionment but an art project that takes the uncreative and demoralizing education system and satirizes it by using its own tools against it? What began as a simple way to pass the time during a seventh-grade science class soon became a daily obsession. With a pen in hand and a nearby calculator displaying ?8008,? I soon found myself tapping out the 5-7-5 rhythm on the desk while twenty pairs of eyes looked on and questioned whether their substitute was sound in the head. Sometimes comical, sometimes depressing, and sometimes nothing more than a seventeen syllable sentence cut and chopped to suit my needs; this book constitutes the single greatest reason I kept walking back into new schools day after day. I never knew what was going to happen inside the classroom. Every new experience provided me with the fodder for creating the next hastily scribbled poem. Poems then crammed inside the book I was reading at the time, awaiting their raison d'être."