Pessimism

During my ELL class last week the HR guy from one of the local school districts came in to speak to our class. I think that my professors purpose was to bring in people who could talk about the opportunities for ELL education in Lane County, and discuss what sort of programs existed in this area. However, I felt more like he came in to tell us all that we weren't going to get jobs.

I understand that he was speaking to a class that was focused on teaching strategies designed for working with EL students, specifically the SIOP model, however I'm not sure if he was aware that many of us are not receiving ESOL endorsements, and none of us are receiving SIOP certification from this course, despite the fact that we have spent at least the last five weeks on the protocol.

The message that I received was that if you didn't have an ESOL endorsement or some sort of SPED certification, then that school district probably wouldn't even look at you for a job. And unless you were foreign and bilingual, your chance at getting a job was slim.

So I understand that this is just information from one guy, about one district, but it leaves me significantly less optimistic then I was before, and it also leave me feeling a bit tricked. If EL certification was so important now, why didn't they tell us this back in the summer when we could have done something about it. Why didn't they tell us then that they were going to start requiring it as part of the program, instead of waiting until part of the way through Fall term when it was too late to take the methods course?

I understand that things take time to change, and I can appreciate that, but it seems like the least that they could do is make it so that the ESOL strategies class that we elected to take actually left us with some sort of certification. After having spent a term learning all about SIOP, I feel sort of cheated that I don't have the sort of certification that a person who takes a weekend seminar on SIOP would have simply because our teacher wasn't certified by the company. It comes down to money. Whoever publishes SIOP wants to be paid for letting people teacher their stuff, and someone somewhere at the University decided that the SIOP class wouldn't include an element by a certified SIOP instructor, so I am left with no certification in an area that could mean the difference between me getting a job, or not getting a job.

I guess it's all just making me a bit blue.