The Past Few Weeks

Still no real word from San Francisco Unified School District. With only 3 weeks left until school starts, I'm thinking that if I do get a job with them, it won't be until shortly before or after the first day of school.

Sick of waiting, way broke, and really wanting a job lined up, early last week I went down to the offices of Head Start to apply for a job as a Preschool Teacher. Thing is, I'm not entirely sure that I have the right qualifications/paperwork to be a preschool teacher. Sure, the credential program that I was in was an Early Childhood [Pre-K to 3rd Grade] emphasis program, but some preschools require other units/classes that end up adding up to some other kind of certification. A woman in my program applied to some preschools last Spring and was alternately told that she was either UNDER-qualified or OVER-qualified. Another woman in my program said to me, "Oh, come on! We're perfectly qualified. I mean, you've been in a preschool setting before - as a teacher you just play with the kids all day. Frankly, I think that we are OVERLY qualified to teach in a preschool." My assumption is that Head Start thinks that I am perfectly qualified because last summer [when I didn't have a job and was collecting unemployment] I went down to the Head Start offices with my resume in hand just to see if I could volunteer at one of their centers. Well, I called and emailed, and called and emailed, and they never got back to me [I just wanted to VOLUNTEER for crying out loud] at all over the summer - however, they did call right when I was starting my student teaching to tell me that they had a preschool teacher JOB available. So, even without a credential of any kind, they seemed to be offering me a job... Let's just hope that they do the same this summer. Thing is, I thought, "Ok, here's someone who's hiring right now and I can talk to someone when I hand in my resume and get offered a job in the next week or so." Well, when I got there the woman at the front desk [who happened to be someone that I worked on a project with in an awful Philippino Literature class a couple of years ago] said, "Ok, I'll take your stuff. Thanks for applying!" I asked if there was someone that I could talk to about the job right now [well, I was there, I wanted a job, and I even TUCKED IN MY SHIRT] and she said, "Oh, the woman who hires the teachers is on vacation until August 15th..." So, I'm pretty much in the same boat with them - just a waiting game at this point.

I temped a few days this week. Actually, I got a call from my agency woman a couple of Thursdays back, and went into the temp gig for the first time on that Friday. Then, they wanted me back Tuesday through Friday last week. It was for this company called Boxport and, even having been there for 5 full days, I'm not entirely sure what it is that they do. It has something to do with setting up accounts for hotels so that the hotel can centrally place orders for towels, forks, plates, Demi tasse cups and saucers [whatever a "Demi tasse" happens to be...], etc. Basically, all of the "stuff" that is in a hotel that a patron would use. So, I sat in a tiny corner of the office, completely in the way of a couple of people whose cubicles were right next to my "shelf", looking through catalogues at a bunch of stuff that I could never afford [$400 for a silver-plated WATER PITCHER!?] that will be used in hotels that I will never stay in. It was stimulating stuff - working in Excel, filling in prices, styles, sizes, colors, and "case pack" [???] numbers. Oh, and I also had to, over and over and over on a bunch of different spreadsheets, change stuff like "Solid Handle Salad Knife" to "Silver, Knife, Salad, s/h", and "Deep Spring Green Pasta Bowl" to "China, Bowl, Pasta, Deep, Spring Green". By Thursday my eyes were bleeding from staring at a computer screen and squinting to look at tiny type in catalogues, and my brain was mush from "Copy"ing and "Paste"ing the same few phrases [1-2 Weeks; Same Day; China, Plate, Dinner; etc.]. In all fairness, there were some really nice people there, especially the woman that gave me things to do all day, and the kind of work that they had me do was right up my alley - very detail-oriented copy editing, standardizing, and fact checking. The woman would explain to me what to do and then leave me to do it - no one looking over my shoulder or putting pressure on me. It's just that they weren't always clear on what they wanted me to do, mostly because I think that they weren't entirely sure what it was that they wanted me to do. So, I typed stuff in, standardizing info that I thought needed standardizing. I'm not sure if I standardized things in the way that they wanted, but at least they were standardized. From a teacher's point of view, I found the whole thing interesting because it had to do with "CONTEXT" - or, in this case, LACK of context. I think that I could've done a better job, and found it all much more interesting, if it had been explicitly explained to me WHAT I was doing, WHY I was doing it, HOW what I was doing would be used later, and WHAT THE HECK THE COMPANY DID ANYWAY. Teaching is the same way, if you want someone to really learn something, you have to put it in a context for them - hopefully, within a thematic context rather than just having kids learn random things at random times. It's not "Hey, kid, learn this!", it's "We're doing this because it's information that will come in handy when you find yourself..." [or something like that...].

The temp gig may continue this week, I'm definitely not going back there tomorrow, but if they need me again they will call. I can't say that I'm hoping that they will call, but we need the money, and it wasn't awful, so I'll certainly go if I get the call. Being there just reminded me how much I really don't like office environments. When I temped at the end of '99, I would sit there in my cubicle, bored to tears, listening in on faux conversations about spending the week in "Tahoe" and their dinner last night at the most expensive restaurant in the city, daydreaming about what my classroom would look like if I were a teacher. In December of '99 I had had enough and enrolled at San Francisco State to finish my undergrad degree and start a credential program. I'm SO not an office person.

I brought with me [to the temp gig] a "teacher book" that Miles recommended and I ended up getting for Christmas called Strategies That Work. I've started reading it because, in addition to the fluff reading that I'm doing this summer, I thought that I should be constantly reading "teacher-y" books to keep my educator's mind alert and fresh, and to be a constant reminder of my ultimate goal. Plus, there are a lot of great $10 ideas and phrases in there that will be great to use when an interviewing Principal asks me about my ideas on literacy in the classroom. So, on my lunch break the first day, feeling like a doofus loser temp in this "high power" office, I pulled out the book and began to read. Honestly, after only reading a couple of pages, the excited tingle of one day [let it be soon] having my own classroom filled me. I walked back to the temp gig feeling refreshed and re-motivated, wishing that I was setting up my classroom, rather than sitting at a shelf [nope, I didn't even get a desk] leafing through high-end china and silver catalogues.

I ate my lunch all last week in Union Square with the tourists [and I think that I saw Peter Dinklage one day]. I can't tell you how many pictures I'm going to end up in - "Oh, honey, look! Here we are in Union Square... Wait, who's that guy in the background scarfing down a Subway sandwich?" It made me wonder, in a "stoner conversation" kind of way, just how many photographs I've been in the background of throughout my life. How many vacation photos - where it wasn't my vacation - have I ended up in because I was in the right/wrong place at the wrong/right time? Now it's something for you to ponder when you're bored... or incredibly high...

I SO need a haircut. I'm beginning to look like the lovechild of Linda Evans and Michael Douglas.