Economics 101, a Novel, -- What's happening

I think that I shall never see a blog as lovely as a novel.

Wait. Disengage from channeling e e cummings.

I'm a little worn out from writing, I need to prepare for the next semester.

I need to reconstruct my resume and start taking it around to new schools because this is my third year at the school where I am and the stupid law about temporary staffing requires the school to offer me a permanent job if they don't fire me.

Which means it requires them to fire me if they don't offer me a permanent job.


Seriously twisted law.

But they don't have any true tenured teachers, near as I can tell. All the certified teachers are under the umbrella of a teacher's union/cooperative, so they have job stability. And that means the school can cycle them as it sees fit.

And I am not certified, so I can only work as temporary staff. And I can't get on the cooperative's job security program, because of rules about how many hours they can give me or something.

And I am too old, they say, to certify.

Nickel and dime me to death.

I'm not sure I want to certify, since certified teachers work 80+ hours a week, not just teaching, but being parent surrogates. This is what socialism does to education, guys.

It's also what unbounded capitalism does to education, guys.


To the whole market. Socialism and communism send you in the general direction of the bottom, but unbounded capitalism also eventually locks everyone into a race to the bottom.

Look up "race to the bottom" in your handiest economics textbook.

(Simply stated, it's the threat of unbounded competition pushing every seller's asking price in the marketplace down to the absolute minimum, which ends up not enough to maintain market presence. Why it inherently infects communistic and socialistic economies requires a longer explanation, and you should be able to find that explanation in a good text on the basics of economics. Maybe I'll get a chance to write a novel for Economics 102 and touch on that there.)

Sorry.

Here's what's happening with Economics 101, a Novel:

I have decided my initial plans for a re-write sanitized the story too much. Took out the sense I had of writing it to see where it led. Made it feel too planned. All of which does not fit the plot, at all. (Not to mention the allegories getting turned inside out.) So those plans are on (probably permanent) hold.

So my plans for the second draft are to move the initial draft here, mostly keeping the structure and story intact, as it is. I just want to fix some glaring grammar, spelling, and logic errors.

I may borrow bits of the re-write that were especially good. (There were a few of those. The biggest bogie in the re-write was the structure.)

I'm not sure when I'll get started, but it should be any day soon now. In the meantime, the rough draft is still fun.