The Story of My Short Career

 ---The Beginning---

This may be long, and a little ho-hum, but I don't think I've shared my story of my job and it's short existence.

I always wanted to be a teacher. I can remember getting the cheap dry erase boards at Wal-Mart and taping them to my Nanny's spare bedroom door. I would set up a card table, old worksheets, a roster of the kids in my class, and teach "them" what I had learned at school that week. I could do this for hours.

When I got to high school, teaching was always on my mind. I job shadowed at several different places, and the last place was my old elementary school. When I got to college, my major was undeclared. I did my general ed classes, transfered to the main campus and had a semester of random classes to see what I may be interested in. Yes, that was two years of classes that I mostly would not need. At the end of that semester, I had to choose. I couldn't waste any more time or more of my parents' money. After many discussions with many people about how I should NOT do it, I decided to become a teacher. I subbed a little bit to figure out what grade level I wanted to teach. I chose high school English.

I finished my classes and student teaching 2.5 years later in December of 2006. Jobs don't open often in the middle of the year, and basically I had two choices. Both schools were about 50 minutes from home, but one of them was a better drive (all parkway), so I interviewed and got the job. I started when the spring semester began, and worked the next year too. However, driving almost an hour each way, and eventually living there in the middle of nowhere alone got old. (I realize some people drive this and more, but I didn't like it!)

It was the hardest year of my  life. Teaching is not how they describe it in college. It's not how you see on tv. It's not how you ever imagine. But I loved it.
I told the principal one day that I might be applying to schools closer to home, but I loved working there. And I did. I loved the school, the teachers, I just hated the location. At the end of the year, six teachers at the high school got pink slipped.

Sidenote- if you aren't in the education business, you may not completely understand. A pink slip is not the same as getting "fired" for doing something wrong or awful. Teachers sign yearly contracts. If you don't have tenure (5 years in the same district), you can get pink slipped, which means that you get a notification letter saying at this time, your contract won't be renewed. The school can always call you back later on, but most schools do this because they don't know the budget, blah blah blah. It's common  practice, and almost every teacher I know has been "pink slipped" at some point.

Ok, so I got pink slipped and was upset. When one of my students complained to the principal, he said, "Well, she doesn't want to be here anyway." I knew he had taken it the wrong way. I didn't want to leave, but I wanted to consider my options closer to home. Maybe I shouldn't have told him, but my mom's friend, a principal, had said to be honest. When the principal had told me that I wouldn't be rehired, he did say that I would be getting a call from another school, closer to home, about an interview. I was still upset, but a little relieved.

About 30 minutes later, the other principal called, scheduled an interview, and sounded optimistic. The next week, I went in for the interview, and the next day was offered the job. I took it.

Little did I know what would await me at the new school. The juicy part, or the story of my  journey through hell, will be continued.....