A former colleague texted me recently, discouraged about not hearing back yet on a job she'd applied for at my new school. She said she was deeply depressed.
I was tempted to snort at that. Really? You're deeply depressed because none of the 3 interviews you've gone on have panned out yet? As I sat in my car, I tallied up 28 interviews I'd gone on....and this is just the ones I could remember off the top of my head while driving down the highway.
Going on that many interviews, many of them right on top of each other, one is bound to make a mistake sooner or later, and it turns out I have. I accepted a job offer, thinking that I was accepting another one. Oops.
See, what had happened was [this is how my students start every explanation] -- I applied for somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 different jobs. One school brought me into their "Book Room" and showed me all the dozens of novels their school board had approved -- and these were great novels. "You can pick whatever you want to teach from here," they said. "And you can pretty much teach it however you want, too, as long as you hit the Standards."
SWEET!
Only...I interviewed at another district right after that. An extremely conservative district. One where there is actually a script to read from. I'm not even kidding! The curriculum looked like this: "Teacher says: 'Now students, we've just finished reading Flowers for Algernon. Take a few moments to write down your thoughts...'"
Those of you who know me IRL know that not only am I at terrible at following written instructions, I am also terrible at being conservative. I tend to plan my own carefully-constructed lessons, and then throw them all out the window as students are walking through the door, adopting a wild idea at the eleventh hour. This is probably the same quality that leads me to perch atop my rolling cart singing "The hiiiiiiillls are aliiiiiiiiive with the sound of muuuuuusic..." while my students wheel me around the room ad naseum.
In any case, I somehow got the schools confused and thought that when I took my new job, I was signing up for a school where I got to teach whatever I wanted, however I wanted. So you can imagine my complete discomfiture when my new boss told me that I am expected to teach exactly what the other 8th grade English teachers are teaching, at the same time they are teaching it...and that I also have no common plan time with them (so I'll have to learn when and how they want me to deliver my script on evenings and weekends, in addition to grading).
$#!&
Oh well. You win some, you lose some, amiright? In this case, I've lost my autonomy and everything that makes a good teacher. I've also lost about $6,000 and one hour a day of sleep (my new school starts HELLA early). And my drum line. But hopefully there are some kind of perks that I have not yet discovered. Like, I don't know...not wanting to jump out a window everyday.
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