About this time last year, I graduated undergrad. In about two more months, I'll be attending Purdue University and working on my doctorate. What happened in between was more enlightening than I had originally bargained for. My job at nameless international school was my first 'real job'. I made a real mess out of it. Thankfully, it's not a job where making a mess of things actually hurts anyone — except the children, of course, but by the time my class got to me they were already beyond my (admittedly limited) art to save. Here's what I learned, then, during that year off.
Between June and August, I maintained a long-distance relationship with my (now ex-)girlfriend, whom I still love and think about fondly. In hindsight, though, I shouldn't have been driving so much. I essentially squandered all of my savings and graduation presents into gasoline, which at that time was upwards of $4.00/gal. I still have mixed feelings about that. Obviously, I love her, but I forgot the first rule of rationality: desire does not by itself change the nature of reality. There were economic limitations that I should have enforced more stringently. I frequently found myself in situations where I could spend money now for us to do things together, or save money for the trip. Ultimately, I chose the former and ended up incurring yet more parental debt, having to borrow enough money to get established.
This is a mistake that I absolutely have to rectify. Wizard's Third Rule: Passion rules reason.
The first semester of my teaching job went by rather quickly. I cut a lot of corners. I should have studied more about the theory of education, but even when I had a chance to correct this oversight while on the job, I chose not to. I failed to apply the idea of tsuyoku naritai effectively. I settled for being first an average teacher, and then as time progressed, a below average teacher. Now, for these last twenty-four days of school, I'm at best a babysitter. That's really unfortunate, and it's mostly my mistake.
Off the job, I did an even worse job trying to keep up with my own personal development goals. I did manage to continue studying Mandarin, but to be perfectly honest I could have studied a lot harder. I did manage to read some good books that I would never have the focus to read in the states: the first half of Being and Time, Anathem, The Meaning of the Creative Act, Aristotle's Metaphysics, Halmos' book on measure theory, and more recently Ken Wilber's Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. You'll see that only one of those books really has anything to do with my final goal of studying mathematics. I really need to do better at that.
One of the important lessons I learned during this time is that given a full-time, non-math related job, I will tend to spend more leisure time recovering from the willpower-draining effects of that job and less leisure time promoting my final goals. Luckily, in the fall I will rejoin the mathematical community and be none the worse for wear.