Well, I didn't get a job.

Despite the fact that I had several promising and engaging interviews I was not hired for the 2009/2010 school year. Fortunately, in the line of work of teaching, not getting a job doesn't banish you to the world of part time service or food industry jobs, no you have the opportunity to substitute teach. For some a way of life, for other their greatest fear, right?

I signed up with all the local districts, I printed business cards and spent the week before school started driving around to different schools where I had an 'in'. And then, when school started, I waited. And just when I was starting to get discouraged (and really worried about where October's rent was going to come from) I started to get calls. Since that first call, today is the first school day that I haven't had to sub somewhere. I have worked in 7 different schools, with ages from pre-school to seniors in high school. I've taught music (quite a lot actually), art, science, math, English... and I have learned more about my values and classroom management as a teacher then I had in a full term of student teaching last spring.

Walking into a classroom and commanding control and respect and accomplishing the goals that the teacher has set down for you is a very rewarding challenge. Thus far I seem to have been fairly successful and have gotten positive feedback from the teachers I've subbed for. Most of the time I've enjoyed what I've been doing, being in different classrooms, schools and with different age groups. I've also really enjoyed the fact that when the school day ends, I clean up and go home. No planning for the next day, no grading, no worrying about how I'll make up for lost time or take care of an issue, or anything like that.

The one aspect of subbing that I don't like is it prevents me from doing much planning in my own life. For the most part, I won't know more then one or two days ahead of time if I am going to be working on a certain day, so I can't make plans for my own life, or plans with friends. Since I am normally such a planner, this leaves me floundering a little when I wake up in the morning and there aren't any calls for the day. But somehow I think I'll manage.

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.