Expendability

Sometimes my ESL lessons don’t go every well, and when that happens, they fail spectacularly. My freewrite today was a journal entry about one day in childhood, which I thought would lead neatly into a review of irregular past tense (my students get -ed verbs, but have trouble with was, had, ate, slept, got, etc.) Instead, it lead to really horrific stories about starvation, abandonment and refugee camps.

After class, my department head told me that there’s definitely no work for me this fall. I saw the writing on the wall a while back; my contract is only for a semester, and the department is losing some funding next semester. Stick and I are most likely moving this August, anyway. But it still sucked to have my expendability pointed out.

Spellcheck says “expendability” isn’t a word, but I’m an English teacher, and I say it is.