The dangers of min-maxing

In pretty much every rpg ever made, the obvious strategy is min-maxing. You choose what you want to be and then you decide which stats matter to you and which stats do not. The stats that matter, you max out. The stats that don't matter, you start with them low and they stay low the whole time you play. If it ever becomes inconvenient for them to be outrageously low, you get them marginally higher to below average levels (the least you can get away with), but never enough to be well rounded. Really it's the only sensible way to play. The most interesting abilities come from specialists, not jacks-of-all-trades. This is true outside of the video game market as well. Specialists are the highest paid. People get paid more depending on how many years they've worked at a company. And honestly, specialists are just in higher demand. Veterans simply perform tasks better, not to mention they are often far scarcer than your average employee.

At some point at an early age, I decided to min max in my life as well. I decided that certain things were important and certain things were not. School was important. Sports was not. Understanding people was important. Cleanliness was not. (which is not to say that I understand people perfectly- simply that I've spent a lot of time trying to) In everything in my life, I do not like to do things by halves. When I turn my attention towards something, I focus on it to the exclusion of everything else. When I was playing Angband, I sometimes forgot to eat. When I decide to start something, I usually see it through, and do more than see it through- I try to become an expert. I try to max out and be the best at whatever I try to do and if some other things fall by the wayside, it's not a big deal because those things were never important to me.

What a horrible reality check teaching has been then. It turns out some of those things that never mattered to me are actually a really big deal. I mean a really big deal. Having a messy classroom - a big deal. Apparently it means I have a poor work environment where people can't get motivated. And the truth is, it has only a negligible effect on me. In reality it's far cleaner than the filth I live in. But it does make a difference to the students. Who wants to come to a graffitied room with the walls bare or in disarray and actually learn there? There are some students who work through that just fine. I would have been one of them. But there are a lot of students who can't work through that because environment does matter.

Another problem is organization, both for myself and the students. I've never been terribly organized. I leave things lying around and then they get lost of forgotten, slip through the cracks. I need to get myself organized and them too. If they are disorganized, they can't learn.

These are all things that I wrote off as not essential when I was a student. No one ever made me be organized. No one ever made me clean my room. And they certainly weren't things I considered important enough to do on my own. Now I am faced with developing a skill set that has been left largely untouched my whole life. The first year of teaching is always challenging, but now I am faced with the additional challenge of learning how to teach while learning how to decorate, how to keep track of a million and one different things, how to discipline, etc. When I first became interested in teaching, one of the reasons I thought it would be a good idea was because I thought I had most of the skills required. I know math inside and out. I am pretty patient (turns out that's kind of a bad skill set to have since it means I don't get angry fast enough to discipline the kids until they've already gotten a little nuts). I'm fine in front of groups and I know how to put together a presentation (this one has turned out to be pretty useful). But the reality of it all is that that is only one small fraction of what it means to be a teacher. Had I known when I first started some of what was required and some of the skills that are important to teaching, I would never have gotten started. As it is, I have to at finish out the year, so it's time to bring some skills marginally up to below average levels. The whole process is extremely embittering as I spend my own money buying decorations and waste my time deciding what would look nice just to get myself at passable levels for my job. Because right now I fail. I could tell the principal when she evaluated me was trying to find some way to give me a passing score, but the truth is that I fail. Suddenly my min maxing is turned against me. It makes me so angry because I have invested a lot of time into being the best at the things at which I excel. But that level of mathematical knowledge isn't really necessary to do the job. Straight As aren't required to get you hired as a teacher. That highly desirable skill set that very few people have isn't doing me a lick of good because I don't have the far more common basic skills that every person with any sense spent some time developing as a kid. I don't even need the advanced mathematics that I always thought was important. I'm a specialist who's been plunged into an environment that requires a broad set of skills, far broader than anything I'm used to. It's unpleasant and uncomfortable and it feels like a waste. I hate it. I wish I could go back to my narrow little world where the work was hard but it was work I knew how to navigate. Every challenge was a puzzle that might take me a while, but in the end I could solve. Here I can't solve the puzzles and most of the time I don't even know how to start. On the rare occasions that I do know how to start, I find myself embittered at what that even means. Steven says it's good to be well rounded, but I can't help but feel like I trained my whole life for a sprint only to be placed in a triathlon without realizing it. Some of the skills transfer over a little, but most of the time, I'm out of my element. Everyone keeps trying to convince me that this is the job for me. My mom always tells me that I'm "meant for teaching" and that I'm good at what I do. Her ignorance and trying to convince her otherwise is a constant thorn in my side. Steven keeps telling me that all jobs are hard. At least he didn't work his ass off to be a computer programmer only to land a job where programming isn't that important.

This whole thing is just getting me upset. I'm going to go play some logic puzzles and further develop that skill set that I don't need.