There is very little respect for paraprofessionals. I am secretly considered a banana-brained, freeloading dummy, to put it nicely. I couldn’t work a true 9 to 5 if it were worked for me, says a member of the asshole class that hasn’t wanted me since the 90’s.

With his calloused way of looking at the good life this hustler backhands his wrenched ideas that are meant to screw the leisure out of me, even, after his hard work, like mine, gets nailed back onto itself into a bent promise that’ll never see the light.

I can’t wait until the summer, I tell him. I’ll have a couple of months to wonder about my own wants and needs, and the hope is by the end of it I’ll start feeling like a person again, just in time to go back to a work where I’ll be in service to a school that by design must erode at the edge of my own sense of empowerment in order to teach children who must learn, without becoming little pricks, how to harvest for themselves that learning how to read closely conditions their hands as much as a blister can.

He thinks through an eternal night-like jealousy that can’t pull itself out of a TV clicker, that like vampires, we teacherly types suck his pride, gold, blood and time out of his so-called more American body. He says to me you are killing us hard-working types so how immoral is it for me to want you gone?

To him a great hole is always swallowing everybody and everybody hates something and you’re obviously not working hard enough if you don’t realize how wishing is for people who can afford to, and with the latter I think he’s right.

We are both bitter cynics sitting around a table playing cards without anything on them, and where I ask myself what would kids and the paraprofessionals who shape them become if they were suddenly not allowed summers off, I’m trying not to give too much sway to the radical inside me who’s whispering in my other ear that super busy, micro-managing type workers are seldom the example-proven and productive leaders they are often too easily believed to be, and must at the very least learn to be honest publicly about this confusion if they want to hold onto their actual workforce. But like that self-demoting would ever happen.