So, it has once again been several weeks since I have had a chance to write, and once again, I am here, fighting the powers that be, jotting down what I can before they can drag me by the coattails and yank me back into place. Upward Bound began on June 19th, 2006, and let me tell you, it has been a rollercoaster ride. Imagine, you're a future high school teacher, about to start your first year, with the fortune of having a laboratory to get you ready, so to speak. You teach high school kids, try the stuff you think might not work, and that's it, right? Well, that's what I thought. And I was wrong. All wrong. So, I've been teaching wave physics to kids for five weeks. The majority of them didn't have an inkling about what physics actually was, or an idea that they could actually do it. Many of them were afraid it was just another class that they would fail. One even has no problem with turning things in blank, leaving zeros in her row of a teacher's gradebook. But, get this: they are learning it. Yes. My students, even against their lowest predictions, are learning the Principle of Linear Superposition. They are learning how to model filament bulbs as point sources. They know about nodal lines and they know how Young's Double Slit Experiment works. And in that, I feel what I sense is the greatest feeling an educator can have: the idea that somehow, someway, you didn't teach your students anything, but instead, they taught themselves, and now the ideas are theirs. It's been a great feeling. So, am I content? No. I'm not. Something is wrong in the town of Orono, something fishy. For some reason, the academic staff has been bitching. A lot. About a lot of things, from students and missing assignments, to the rest of the staff that seems to rest on a different front from us. There's the residential staff, who live with the kids in the program, who fill their lives with so much social brouhaha that they have little (if any) time to dedicate to the true heart of the program: academics. There are members of the full-time staff that feel like the kids in the program are six, like they need their hands held and their heads patted at every turn. And we, the academic staff, are starting to look like assholes for assigning homework. For holding kids to high standards. For expecting them to do work, expecting them to take ownership of the education they supposedly want. And then there's my personal life. Shannon and I have had a rough time of it, living apart and alone from one another. I've felt like she resents me for this, and I held the irrational suspicion for a while that she wasn't valuing what I have wanted to do for so long (teach). I think in that time where things got really rough (I didn't see Shannon for 10 days, which for us is incredibly tough), I managed to lose sight of us. And in all the bitching that we have done as an academic staff, I think I lost sight of what I am here for. So I took a drive last night. It was short; maybe five or six minutes, but I realized that it wasn't the bitching or the fighting or the despizing that I lived for. It wasn't competing for ego space in an educational environment where your kids want you for your grade. It was the simple joy of a student in my physics class, so pumped and excited for getting a B- at the five-week point. It was hearing that two students were so bothered by the idea of the Theory of Everything that they needed to find their own, concluding that Pokemon is the secret to unification. It was hearing that the physics was fun, and hearing that student after student wanted to be there, that it was enjoyable to them. It was the idea that a filament bulb held up to a triangular hole with a screen still caused wonder. And the tough times in my relationship with Shannon has taught me that, as a physicist, it's no wonder that I am so obsessed with the ideas of space and time. It's no wonder that I have worked so hard to understand how those things are quantified, and how we can change them as they change us. For some reason, space and time are no longer issues; they are simply reference frames, as opposed to fences, walls, barriers, or currents that tear things apart more often than they bring them together. And it's no wonder that this obsession has led me to compulsively listen to Transatlanticism, Death Cab for Cutie's fourth album, preaching space and time and what they are and why they do what they do. And it's no wonder that I can realize a second can be so eternal, and a meter so abyssal, yet a mile so close, and years so fleeting. Strangely enough, the summer has made me young again, amid all the strange adversity. And amid all the dirt in the trenches, the moments in the sun, away from the rain, this summer has been more than worth it.