Things happen fast. Within an hour of putting up that post yesterday, I got an email from another principal at a different school letting me know that they had an opening for the same job I currently have and asking if I was interested in it. I went in for a brief interview this morning, and … well, at this point we’re just waiting for dots and crosses, so to speak. Naturally, the first principal called me during the other interview to offer me the job, and to be honest, a part of me really does regret having to turn him down. But this way I don’t have to worry about grading for eight hours every Sunday for the entire school year, and I don’t care what else is involved; I’m just not going to ever miss that.
Of course, now I have to talk to my current boss, something I will happily put off until everything is good and official but nonetheless requires doing. And that’s gonna be a not very pretty sort of conversation, because “I know this situation we’re in is kind of shit, and rather than doing anything to fix it I’m kinda gonna make it worse, and, man, good luck with all that, I’ll be over here, not helping at all” is just not going to be any fun.
Do I feel bad about it? Yeah, a little. Not enough that it matters, though; not enough that I’m willing to put my family through what I’ll be like next year if I stay, but I feel bad about it. I’ll, uh, let y’all know how it goes.
A two hour job interview today. Not, like, interviews with multiple people in a row that totaled up to two hours. One interview, with one person, that lasted two hours.
I was interviewing for two different jobs– math at two different grade levels, basically, so it’s not like the questions were going to be different and that’s why the interview ran long– but I got the feeling that the principal was definitely zeroing in on one grade instead of the other by the end of the interview. Which is fine. I’ve been teaching middle school long enough that grade levels don’t really matter all that much to me any longer, although I do have a preference for one curriculum over the other, for whatever that might be worth. I gotta feel like if you sit down with me for two damn hours then you’re probably pretty serious about bringing me into your building; a red flag at any point could have ended the interview a whole hell of a lot sooner.
And here’s the thing, right? If you’ve been around here for a while, or if you’ve read Searching for Malumba, you know good and damn well that if you ask me questions about education you’re gonna get answers. I’m better at talking coherently about classroom praxis and education in general than I am at almost everything else. Which means that I interview really goddamn well for teaching jobs, and the number of teaching jobs where I’ve made it to the interview stage and not been offered a job is frankly prettydamnsmall.
At any rate, I think it’s probably reasonable to believe that I’m gonna get offered a job at this school in a couple of days. Not guaranteed, certainly, because shit happens, but I think it’s reasonable, especially since I was applying for two different jobs. Which will mean that I’ll be back in the classroom this fall.
Which I have … mixed feelings about, as you well might imagine, if you’ve been around here for a while. And those mixed feelings made honestly answering questions like why are you applying for this job a bit more … I dunno, fraught than they might be? Because I really do have mixed feelings about the idea of leaving my current position. It’s just that after being placed irregularly into a classroom over the last half of last year, at least until ILEARN hit and then my life went to hell, I’m pretty goddamn certain that I’m gonna be teaching this year on at least a part-time basis whether I want to or not, and I’m absolutely going to get asked to write lesson plans for classes I’m not teaching, and, well …
Here’s the thing: something has to change, one way or another, because of reasons having really nothing at all to do with me or the job I actually did. I know where I’m at right now is probably not tenable, so there are a bunch of available moves that represent improvement over my current situation, and one of these two jobs would do that. And … that’s basically how my answer went? That, honestly, returning to classroom teaching wasn’t ideal to me, but that if that was what was going to happen anyway (and I think it will,) I would rather be in control of the where and the when and the what than where I think I’m gonna be if I don’t make some changes.
And, well, the principal talked to me for another hour and forty minutes, so it must have been an acceptable answer, I guess.
Just applied for a teaching position for this fall, a math job. I don’t really want to go back to the classroom right now, but given what’s coming toward me next year I don’t think I have a choice– or, at least, the choice is between “teach in a location and position of my choosing” or “get thrown into a classroom on a temporary basis” like what happened last year. And I’m choosing to get ahead of it rather than sitting around and hoping.
I alluded a couple of weeks ago to a job opportunity that I was looking at that would have represented a substantial raise as well as a responsibility level more in-tune with my current career goals. I am proud to announce that, in keeping with being in week 7 or so of the worst month of my life, I was not even called for an interview for that job despite being literally the only person currently employed by my district who has done it.
I did have a job interview today, though, for my own fucking job, as in the job I have right now and I have been doing for a year. They slightly altered our job descriptions and cut a few of us and so everyone has to re-interview. I spent some time last night thinking carefully about what to wear to the interview, which I had deliberately scheduled for the last half hour of the school day so that I didn’t have to return to my building afterward.
My typical work uniform is a collared shirt, short-sleeved, with jeans and black shoes that pass for dress shoes at a casual glance but are not. I occasionally wear a tie, especially earlier in the year, and during the winter I frequently wear a sweater over the shirt. I despise long sleeves– something about the feeling of cloth on my forearms has always made me skeevy– and even if I’m wearing a dress shirt or a sweater the sleeves will be rolled up, meaning that I don’t often wear a sport jacket (or a blazer, or a suit coat, and frankly I don’t know what the hell the differences are between those things) because I’m not about to unroll my sleeves and struggle with cuffs just to put a jacket on.
Anyway, I ended up going with a dress shirt and a tie and jeans and slightly more formal shoes, because fuck it, I’m interviewing for a job I already have and if my clothes matter then my clothes don’t matter at all, if that makes any sense and just stare at it until it does if not.
I think the interview went okay, but hell if I know. The general rule lately is that if anything can go wrong it will, so I’m sure I fucked this all up somehow. There is one more day of school tomorrow and then a teacher work day and then I will relax for three days and then I’m gonna start writing a goddamn book. I got plans, dammit.
Oh, and when I got home I jumped in the pool for the first time. Which was fucking freezing. I’m not complaining. I’m in the right mood for freezing cold water, and I wasn’t in there for more than 20 minutes or so anyway. But man, it was nice.
I applied for a job today– a job I’m well qualified for, and would be good at (and, basically, have already done under a different title) and the application window is tight enough that there shouldn’t be a ton of other applicants, and which would come with an enormous raise.
So, whatever it is that you might do to try and shove some good luck in the direction of other humans, I’d appreciate it if you’d do some of that toward me in the next few days.
You have probably forgotten, because my life is not actually all that important to anyone outside of my immediate family no matter how much time you spend on this blog, but I did myself a bit of vagueblogging a couple of weeks ago. As of yesterday morning, the need for vagueblogging has passed! I can stop holding onto this goddamn secret that has been making me nuts since IndyPopCon!
I put in my notice at my job yesterday. As of August 8, I will no longer be a furniture salesman, and I’ve got another week of paid vacation between now and then.
Thank Christ.
I will say, to be fair, that I like the people I work with a lot, and despite my frequent complaints about it there are a lot of much worse jobs than selling furniture. But after a hair more than two years of three 11-hour days a week and working every. single. fucking. weekend I have had enough. My son will turn 7 a few weeks after I quit. He is starting to notice that Daddy is not ever around on the weekend. And regardless of how I might feel about any other aspect of the job, I can’t have that.
What am I doing, you ask?
I am returning to education. I’m not returning to teaching, or to administration, however. I won’t be working directly with kids, at least not much, although I will be working in a school. The job is primarily tech related, meaning I get all the advantages of being a teacher– including the pay, which should be substantially more than I’m making now– and very few of the disadvantages that drove me out of teaching a few years ago. I am not a teacher, though.
I have known about this since the Saturday of IndyPopCon. I applied for the job on that Thursday, had a number of email back-and-forths on Friday regarding scheduling an interview, and on Saturday the principal called me, cancelled the interview, and hired me on the spot. After two years of applying for half a dozen jobs a month and getting no interviews at all, to be hired without one was immensely fucking gratifying. It’s almost like I have skills that are useful in certain circumstances!
At any rate, I’ve been waiting for a few ducks to get their lazy asses lined up regarding the job becoming a bit more official before quitting and announcing it here, and considering that I started getting emails from my new employer today, I figure that’s as official as it needs to be. I also needed to make sure I got that second week of vacation scheduled on a certain week where my wife will be in Boston without me and it will be much easier to make it through life if I’m not at work, so today turned out to be a great day to make everything official. I figure I’m giving just under five weeks of notice; finding someone to replace me in that time shouldn’t be that hard.
(That said, if you know me in my Clark Kent guise and know anyone who would be good at sales, we’ve got a couple of open jobs. No particular education or experience necessary other than a high school diploma. Hit me up.)
So, remember a couple of weeks ago when I said I was applying for a teaching job? That wasn’t quite true, at least in the strictest sense of the word “teaching.” It was a job, in a school, that would involve occasionally interfacing with kids but which seemed, from the description, to actually mostly involve backing up teachers and being a resource for them rather than a job where I was in front of a classroom all day. I messed around with my work schedule a bit this week after getting a couple of emails from the HR director, who indicated there would be an informational meeting at the school that it might be useful to come to.
(I’m leaving out a lot of details, obviously; this program involves a pretty substantial infusion of money and is a new thing for the school to the point where renovations are happening in the building right now for it, so the idea that they’d invite people who are applying for the job to this informational meeting makes more sense than you might think– the building staff was also invited.)
So. Yeah. I went to the meeting. There were maybe a dozen staff members present and at least three people who were there because they were applying for the same job I was– me and two others, in other words.
The lack of buy-in from the staff was a physical force in the room, and the sinking feeling that started moments after the presentation began never really got any better.
I happened, after the meeting was over, to walk out of the building with one of the other two applicants.
“Was that job what you thought it was when you applied?” I asked.
“Not even a little bit,” she said. And she didn’t say “You can have it,” but it was pretty damn clear she didn’t want it any longer.
They are actually looking for two people to fill this job, who will both be in the new facility at all times. Along with sixty kids.
Sixty. At once.
Three blocks a day, of– lemme say it again– sixty kids. Seventh and eighth graders. In a program that, in my professional opinion, is a massive waste of time and resources if they’re going to treat it as a class that you get a grade for. In a nicely renovated, brand-new space featuring two load-bearing walls in the middle of the Goddamn room that cannot be moved and guarantee that there will be no place where a single teacher can stand and see all of his or her students.
I have made $2500 in commission on my sales this year. This year. Six weeks. I did the math; I’m selling furniture for less than $11 an hour. The company is currently earning interest on sixty thousand dollars of undelivered product. I don’t get paid until shit ends up in people’s homes and everything I’ve sold is either still backordered or waiting for someone’s house to be ready. Right now I expect to make minimum wage this week. If I wasn’t married to someone who makes a lot more money than me, I’d be staring down homelessness right now.
I had a $12,000 ticket last weekend that didn’t earn me a single dime and won’t pay off until May. That big $18,000 sale at the very end of December? Scheduled to deliver on March 20th, still five weeks away; I don’t see a cent until then.
I was at work for nine hours today and sold $13 worth of product. A co-worker came in on his day off and made $3300 in sales in less than half an hour.
Fuck this. I could literally be making more money flipping burgers.
You have probably forgotten, because my life is not actually all that important to anyone outside of my immediate family no matter how much time you spend on this blog, but I did myself 
So.
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