Teaching
The teaching job ended up a bad fit, and I decided several weeks ago that I'd wrap it at the end of this semester. I treasure the experience I have gained, and I leave the door open for future opportunities in this sphere, but this position in particular doesn't work well for me.
Some of this is general shock at re-entering the salaried life, even part-time, and finding surprise at how much I've grown apart from it since 2005. To read this makes me sound a little like a sniffing prima donna, but it's more an effect of how I've defining my own pace and attitude about work over the last several years. I don't fit so well anymore in the compartmentalized schedule that salaried work requires, something that seems obvious in retrospect but which I didn't consider beforehand. It would be a different story were I switching careers entirely, but I attempted this instead as a balancing act, and I find it doesn't work how I hoped it would.
For one thing, I hadn't foreseen how much I'd dislike commuting again, but I do. Reading and podcasts help take the edge off, but that's still two and a half hours a day burned up, like it or not. (The trip to campus takes between 45 and 60 minutes, but after a couple of harried early days, I find myself compelled to leave super-early as a buffer against unexpected subway failure, because showing up late for class is not an option.)
More to the point, I perform poorly with mixing my own work-pace with an externally enforced schedule. I find that I can't do much in the way of creative work (including Appleseed work) when I know that my time from noon through 6 is spoken for. Sometimes I can sneak some work in, but more often the entire work-day goes into supporting that day's 100-minute class meeting, and then I don't want to do anything else. As a bad side-effect, the two weekdays I have free therefore feel like days off, rather than days to cram full of Appleseed catch-up. I do my best at that just the same, but under a sort of internal protest that it's the weekend and I really should be decompressing with video games or something. Even though it's Thursday.
In balance, doing my best at the teaching job leaves scarce little time to run my business, and exactly zero time to pursue any other creative projects. This is why I have not made a single Gameshelf post since the semester began, and why I have attended almost no gatherings of the local game-studies and game-development groups. I balm any frustration about this by looking at the teaching as filling my creative-project slot, which does make sense - but that also provides an even stronger argument to draw the project to a close, rather than continue doing it indefinitely. (In this light, I do look forward to writing up my experience next month, including all the written class materials I developed; a contribution both to my successor in this position and to the world at large.)
Other problems are specific to this class, and the largest struck on day one. After I agreed to lead three weekly sections of 20 students each, the school decided to increase the cap of the popular class, so that I ended up with section sizes closer to 40. This makes for a very different, and I'd argue lesser, experience for both student and teacher, especially for a class that was supposed to be a highly interactive games lab. Once the honeymoon ended and the reality of the scaling problems I now faced dawned on me, I became upset enough to write a resignation letter before September ended, though I was willing to ride out the semester. So that's what I've been doing.
Before September, when I was very excited to start this job, I often said to friends "If I'm not terrible at it and I don't hate it, I'd consider a new career." Well, I don't think I'm terrible at teaching - the right proportion of students seem to be digging it, one teacher-pal who visited thought I was doing just fine, and the program is already inviting me to return to teach other classes. But it is a terrible fit. And while I certainly wouldn't say I hate the job, one close friend suggests that I do hate the fact of being wrong about how much I'd love it, which I'll allow.
So: all that. I've six more class meetings spread over the next three weeks, and then back to life. The last three months have felt like nine, just from the sheer amount of novel challenges they've held, and there ain't nuthin wrong with that.