Good days, bad days...

Today qualifies as a good day, as far as my career switching goes. Nearly a foot of snow has blanketed New England and school was cancelled. No school, no work.

I got to really enjoy today at home - playing in the front yard with my babies for almost an hour, building a squat, but jolly-looking snowman with them; teaching my older son how to use our brand new high efficiency front loading washer; catching up with friends and family on Facebook; eating hot chicken soup and drinking warm cocoa; snuggling with the wee ones on the couch as they napped... Yes. Today has been a lovely break.

Days like this are one of the perks of making the committment to be a high school teacher. Days like this make me feel less terrified by my choice.

Unfortunately, I find that there are more days that leave me sad, angry, and bored. Last week, I was driving to my job, which is nearly an hour from my home, listening to NPR in the car. I caught the tailend of an interview with a scientist at McGill University who had worked on a newly published Nature Neuroscience paper detailing the effect of child abuse on the gene expression of a glucocorticoid receptor in the adult brain. It's the second paper from this group in a year that has highlighted the critical balance of nature and nuture that dictates whom we become via epigenetics. I was fascinated.

In the old days, I would have read about these articles nearly as soon as they were published - either by reading a steady slew of journal TOCs that flooded my email inbox, through a weekly journal club meeting, or just casual conversations with lab mates. Now to be fair to myself, the day I heard the NPR piece was the day that the article was pre-published online so I wasn't too far behind the curve. But it was a fluke that I caught the broadcast. What if I had turned the dial to the local Top 40 Pop station instead? I wouldn't have heard about the research or the Canadian Suicide Brain Bank at all.

When I got to work, I tried mentioning the articles to two coworkers and got mildly amused acknowledgement. A third coworker finally gave me the type of response I was hoping for - genuine interest in the mechanism - though I had to explain some basics of epigenetics to him. We pulled up the paper (thank goodness for open access) and skimmed it over. We talked about some of the implications the paper raised. And then I lamented that I couldn't really bring it up in my classes. Because for the most part, freshman in high school struggle with the basics of cell parts and cell division so explaining environmentally induced methylation patterns that manage to "keep off" specific gene expression decades later is really out of the question... After all, I need to teach a little bit about all areas of biology before the End of Course assessment in May - no time for Dr. ResearchRecreant's flights of fancy.

It's like I am a recovering drug addict, slowly weaning myself off of the highs (and lows) of research. I miss the mental stimulation of lab life. My old life. My old identity. The only problem is that like any addict I am struggling and sometimes I relapse. Leaving me very uncomfortable in my own skin.