Tag: jobhunting

Super Social Saturday

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I had family in town today— my favorite aunt, along with her oldest son and his wife were in town from Michigan and California, respectively, and they went and picked my dad up and came over here for the day. It was a lot of fun but I am well and truly worn out from just being a human for several hours. I’m trying to beat Dandara just so I can put it to bed and figure out what I’m doing with the YouTube channel (wanna be subscriber #115? Sure you do!) in the days between this final episode going live on Monday and Elden Ring coming out on the25th, and right now I’m kinda clueless. I do know that my hands hurt because my current strategy for this utter bullshit final boss involves lots of button-mashing.

This is all a lengthy way of saying this is going to be all the blogging I have brain for today. Any cells I have left in another hour or so will be devoted to finding a couple more jobs to apply to. One of the ones I sent in an application for today has a salary range of $125-185,000, so I am denying myself nothing; if I think I’m even vaguely interested in the job, I’m applying. Not like I have anything to lose.

(There is an interesting phenomenon going on here, where I’m looking at jobs with high salaries and immediately feeling like I can’t possibly be qualified for them, and fuck that. I’ve met businesspeople. They’re people. I can be people too. Fuck it. I want a six-figure job. Give me one. I’m not letting my own bullshit hold me back here.)

In which I’m fine, God, leave me alone

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

So it turns out that one good way to have every single person in the building stop by your classroom to see if you’re okay is to say “fuck this” and leave work before advisory has even finished. Being out Wednesday and Thursday was already pre-ordained, but most of the building didn’t know that, and apparently as far as anyone knew I’d walked out and just not come back for a few days. I know that one of our seventh grade teachers took the entire week off explicitly as a mental health restorative and one of my other team members was forced into a panic attack on the same day I left, if you were wondering if it was just me.

The interesting thing? I don’t know if I actually mentioned this, but the Tuesday before last our principal and AP let the staff know that they’d been fired as of the end of the school year. Now, to be clear, if you’d read everything I’ve been saying about how work is going all year long, I wouldn’t cast aspersions upon you for at least considering the idea that a change in leadership might be necessary. I will provide this data point in their defense and then move on with the post: virtually no one left their jobs last summer. Our building was one of the only schools in the corporation and absolutely the only middle school that began the school year with no teaching vacancies. We had a couple of people who left for one reason or another but their jobs were filled quickly.

And from what I’ve been hearing over the last week and a half, I strongly suspect whoever replaces the current admin team is going to have to rehire at least 2/3 of the positions in the building. People who were already thinking about leaving, like me, have made their decisions. And everyone else is now at least thinking about it.

Anyway, as of about ten minutes ago I’ve now applied to 29 jobs since January 28. I’ve heard back from two; both “thanks, but no thanks” rejections. I applied to a couple today that actually seem pretty exciting. Hopefully soon I’ll start hearing back from somebody.

At any rate, it was a decent-to-good day. No referrals of any kind, which is always a plus, and one of my notables wasn’t in class and another had one of the best days he’s had in a long time, so I’ll take it. I’ve got a fair amount of grading to do this weekend, so hopefully I’m not going to have to send another email to all of my parents reminding them that all of their kids are still fucking failing. We’ll see what happens.

Next week: four days, since Friday is an e-learning inservice day for the teachers. The following week: four days, since Monday is Presidents’ Day. I think the week after that is a five-day week, but the week after that will be the last week of the quarter and therefore Friday will be a teacher record day. I’m gonna try and make it to the end of the semester without missing any more days, or at least without missing any days beyond taking a personal day when Elden Ring comes out. Again, we’ll see.

Free day off!

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, WorkLeave a comment

I was supposed to have jury duty today, and as of last night it hadn’t cancelled, so I was hoping that this would actually be the time that I get to serve on a jury– and yes, I mean get to, because I’ve never done it before and I wouldn’t mind the experience. I got the notification that my service was cancelled as I was getting into the car to head to the courtroom– which, on one hand, yay, because I’d already gotten the day off and it wasn’t like I was going back in, and on the other hand boo, because I’d gotten the day off so I could go do my Civic Duty as an American and that clearly wasn’t happening.

It’s not like there’s any chance I’m ever going to be allowed on a jury in the first place, unless the prosecutor isn’t paying attention and just assumes that since I’m a fat bald white guy with a beard I’m going to assume that whoever they put in front of me is guilty. I was kinda looking forward to declaring that all cops were bastards in my jury questionnaire. Alas, ’tis not to be, at least not this time.

So I came back inside and started job-hunting. Someone asked yesterday what sorts of jobs I was looking for. There’s a spreadsheet, because of course there is:

The blacked-out one is my kid’s school; they don’t actually have any openings right now but I sent in an application anyway just in case somebody resigns anytime soon. I’m not holding my breath over that one, but it’s pretty much the only way I’m in a classroom next year, since it’s a private school, which I’m pretty sure means that HB 1134 can’t touch it. If I find out otherwise I will probably mark them off the list. Nearly all of the rest of them are remote.

The interesting thing: I’ve been complaining about the quality of the jobs that the various search sites have been returning, but it turns out that once you start telling them what you’re applying for they start figuring out how to dial you in. I’m still getting the occasional blip where I search for education-related jobs in my area that pay $65K or more and get something in Fiji that pays $2 an hour to masturbate musk oxen, but … well, it’s getting better.

Anybody have any contacts at Edmentum, by any chance?

Just wondering

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Has anyone else, while perusing job listings, seen a listing for a job with what is obviously a tech company, taken one look at the tech company’s name, and decided that regardless of the job, the tech company was going to be out of business in a few years and so there was no good reason to apply? I just got kicked a listing for a company called Optimizely. Optimizely. And … nah. That’s got pets.com written all over it. As soon as the venture capital runs out these folks are gonna be gone. I mean … this is from their website:

Does that not absolutely scream “we are burning through our seed money as fast as we can move it offshore”? These folks are gonna have their pink slips before I can finish the application. I love this picture, too:

I’ll give them this: for a tech company, there do seem to be a fair number of women around, at least in the pictures. But you don’t get to have someone holding up an “embrace inclusion” poster when you only managed to find one black person to stand in the picture, and given how awful the Photoshopping is across the board on this image one wonders if he was actually in the room with everybody else. A couple of those people initially scan Asian or maybe Hispanic but that is still a group of white people with some pepper sprinkled on it, not anything that looks like “inclusion.”

Note also that in all of those posters there’s not a hint of what this company actually does, which I suspect boils down to nothing at all anyway. I bet half the employees at this place couldn’t nutshell what their jobs actually are for.

Anyway, I’m still job hunting. Just not with these guys.

Blech, pt. 716

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I applied for a couple of jobs yesterday. I don’t know how I feel about it, really, and I’m not expecting much to come from it, necessarily, but I did it. I remain convinced that if I’m still teaching next year, I want to be teaching at the same school, but Indiana’s legislature appears to have decided that they don’t want me in their classrooms. There are a Black Lives Matter and a gay pride flag hanging in my room. Part of me is very much in “If the governor wants them, he can come and get them himself” mode, and part of me is so sick of how America treats teachers that I no longer want anything to do with the entire enterprise. When I quit in 2016 it was because I got sick and my doctor more or less told me I had to. This time? I’m defeated. I can’t do this anymore; America wants to be a society where only the wealthy get any education and everyone else gets a babysitter, and I refuse to be a babysitter.

God, I don’t even remember if I talked about this, so forgive me if I’m repeating things, but I sent an email out to my parents on Sunday letting them know that forty-six of my seventy-one kids were failing math. I take this shit personally, as I deliberately set up everything about my class to make it virtually impossible to fail if you actually try.

I emailed maybe 50 of my parents; the rest I don’t have email addresses for despite the fact that it’s 20fucking22 and I know good and fucking well they all have email. I heard back from one. The rest either never saw the message because they gave their kid’s school an email address they never look at or they looked at it and shrugged. Fuck it. You want your kids warehoused too, apparently. I don’t know how much longer I can do this even under the best of circumstances, and … man, I’m done with all the rest of it.

Oh, great, let’s definitely do this again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I have spent my Saturday playing video games and diligently trying to avoid perusing job websites again. My one goal this week was go to work all five days, and I managed that, but Friday’s events (and forgive me, but I’m going to continue vagueblogging on this) have me even more burned out than I was. Nobody in my building– hell, no teacher I know– can believe it’s only the end of October. It feels like February already, which leaves me in trembling horror about what February is going to actually be like. And again, this isn’t just me. It’s every teacher I know.

The problem, of course, is exactly the same problem we had the last time we went through an I-want-to-quit-teaching phase, which is that I have no idea what the hell else I would do. I’m not about to go back to selling furniture, if for no better reason than I can’t freaking imagine what the supply chain fuckery for those guys must be like right now. People used to get mad when stuff got delayed a week or two; I don’t want to have the conversation where I tell someone that their sofa is delayed six months because they can’t get the wood to build the frame and then once it ships it gets delayed another month because it’s sitting on a barge outside San Francisco with no one to unload it. No thank you.

It would be cool if I managed to multiply my number of YouTube followers by, oh, a hundred thousand or so and could make a living from that, but even if that’s in my future– and it’s probably not– it’s not going to be happening quickly under any circumstances. I’ve pretty much walked away from writing fiction for the forseeable future, although probably not for forever, and even when it was going relatively well that was never making remotely enough money to live off of. Simple fact is that teaching pays the best of all my available alternatives unless I get lucky, and (falls down a rabbit hole looking for jobs again) there are things about my building that I really like. I don’t want to bail on my team, which in a lot of ways is the best group of teachers I’ve ever worked with. I don’t want to bail on my administrators, who I also like a hell of a lot.

I want to teach. I just want teaching to not suck. And the worst thing is, I really think that’s an unreasonable thing to want right now.

In which there is an unexpected development

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

I have recently come across an Employment Opportunity that is worth thinking about and investigating. Don’t get too excited; I haven’t even decided to apply, much less done so and been called for an interview or anything like that. Nor do I know how much it would pay. But for now, just trust me that it’s an Employment Opportunity and leave it at that.

At any rate, I’m bringing it up because my first thought upon discovering of its existence was I’m not sure I want to leave teaching right now. And, more broadly, I’m not certain I want to leave teaching again.

Which is … not the direction I thought my life was heading a few months ago. One of the numerous problems with being a teacher, of course, is the limited window one has to find a new job if one wishes to 1) stop teaching without 2) abandoning one’s current students. And I am finding that I am far enough into the year and I like my kids enough (most of ’em, at least) that the notion of ending the school year early even for a much more lucrative job gives me quite a bit of pause. The most amazing thing is that I’m not currently planning on a mad scramble for a new job this summer. For the first time in forever I feel like if I ended up in the same job next year that I have this year I’d be okay with that. And that surprises the hell out of me, especially since I mostly teach 8th graders who are all going to be gone next year anyway whether I like it or not. One way or another I’m highly unlikely to be in these kids’ lives for more than about seven more months; is it really that big of a deal if I were to leave in, say, January rather than June?

Apparently it is.

I’m going to look into this job anyway, because there’s no harm in looking into it; it’s not like I’m committing to anything by putting in an application, and they may not be interested in me or it may turn out that the job doesn’t pay enough or really any number of things. But it’s odd to realize that I’m back in the position where “Yes, please, now, please” wouldn’t be my immediate reaction to escaping the classroom again, especially since ending up where I have was at least a bit of a last resort anyway.

God help me, I may actually be enjoying my job again. Weird, innit?

Ha ha ha ha ha never mind

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

So, yesterday was a day, and it is a hundred forty degrees outside and I have already spent about half my waking hours in the pool, and you may disregard the entirety of yesterday’s post because why would things like saying I would like to offer you this job mean that you get a job, and I’m just keeping my mouth shut from here on out until I have signatures on shit.

I am tired and overheated and spent most of yesterday in an exceptionally bad mood and all I want to do today is play video games and not catch on fire.

Man do I wish I had been born in any generation other than the one that literally ended the world.