Friday, March 11, 2011

The job search begins

I guess it didn't matter anymore.  There was no time to reflect, only time to plot my escape.  First, I applied to any job I could find that required a background in education.  I didn't get any responses; I guess I wasn't the only teacher looking for a way out.  It was a friend of mine who gave me the most promising lead.  She had been a teacher before, and she took pity on  me. She worked at an adult school that taught English to immigrants. Adult education seemed perfect: students who paid attention, who didn't yell at you, who even wanted to learn. Each day my friend mentioned another supervisor she had talked to about me, and each day, I fantasized just a little more about how my last day at Daley would feel.  Would I give the principal two weeks, would I send him an email, or even better, would I just walk out in the middle of a particularly bad afternoon.  All great ideas.  I was still praying by the way.  But I was no longer praying to be a better teacher, I was praying to get out.

The adult ed school called and I scheduled the interview for 4:30 on a Tuesday.  This meant I had to leave Daley right after school to arrive on time. On this day, I had colorful marker stains all over my fingers—I spent the day erasing a marked up whiteboard over and over again without an eraser.  The erasers never last more than a week.  Sometimes I would find a broken one under my desk with bite barks on it.

It took forever to get that dry erase marker off my fingers, and I arrived late to the most important interview of my life. The first of two interviews was just about my resume, and I felt great discussing all the nice volunteer jobs I had before Daley. She asked why I was leaving behind my second graders, and I kept myself from disclosing the real reason, that it was a struggle to show up each day at work because I was starting to hate it. I just told her second graders weren’t motivated to learn, and she smiled, “I know the feeling. I started as a high school teacher, but teaching adults is much more fulfilling.” The interview was going just fine. To help students speak English and find a job seemed like just what I needed. I could still teach, I could make enough money, and I could start sleeping at night, and maybe even enjoy my weekends again. Grandma James would understand, she probably would give me a big hug; she had been telling me to get out for weeks. Well, I had given Daley my best shot, but I was beaten. It was time to walk on.

But by my second interview I realized something was wrong. She told me I had to be bilingual.  I actually spoke Spanish, but I was intermediate at best.  My second interview was conducted completely in Spanish, and it was going decently until she started asking me about the attendance programming system we used at Daley. I didn’t even know the answer in English. Then she switched to English and started explaining what the job was. It wasn’t a teaching job at all; it was registering new students.  I would be on the phone all day, speaking Spanish with people who wanted to learn English.  There would be no English speaking at all.  She also asked if I had a high school diploma or a GED. As an intermediate Spanish speaker with a masters degree, I was both under-qualified and over-qualified. It also paid an hourly wage right around that of Target; I withdrew my name from the list just to avoid the embarrassment of getting rejected by a job that I couldn’t afford to take anyway. It was back to the whiteboard for me.

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