Thursday, June 11, 2009

A Wild Morning

So today started out as a normal day. My son and I were relaxing by playing Lego Star Wars II (OK I was playing and he was watching, the game was his idea) and my daughter was still sleeping. The only irritating thing was the phone would not stop ringing! My wife called which was cool, her and my son talked on the phone and put a smile on both of their faces, then it was call after call. Needless to say I was getting irritated and I was tempted to let the answering machine do it's thing, but I decided to answer it one last time. Good thing I did because it was a middle school principal asking if I was interested in an open position this fall and when could I come in for an interview. Now the interview part was the tricky part since I was the one staying at home. I relayed this to the principal who replied that it would be fine to bring them along, that this was an informal interview. So I then had 45 minutes to shower, get two kids dressed and get the three of us down to the school for this 'informal interview'.

Somehow I managed to arrive on campus right on time, kids dressed and on their best behavior even. The position is for 8th grade English at a Title 1 school in a mainly hispanic area of North Town. The school itself is old and has heating and A/C issues (what school does not?) but it also has plenty of technology and the class sizes will still be in the 30s because of it's Title 1 status (literally 99% of the school is on free and reduced lunch). I also got so see what a classroom looks like and I got to meet the librarian who was very nice and kept the library in very nice shape.

As far as the Title 1 goes, that does not bother me I spent the last quarter last school year subbing at a Title 1 school and really enjoyed it. The school is not too far away which is nice and I like the fact that they have ELMOs and Smartboards as well as LCD projectors. Plus the principal hates weekly spelling words. It's one thing to have a vocab list that is specific to your lesson etc., but another entirely to simply have them memorize 20 more words. Total waste of time if you ask me. What I might do is to see if there is a montage of Bill O Riley's word of the day and use that as a bell ringer of some sort since his words are fairly uncommon and it would certainly be a change of pace for them.

I must have said something right to her because she offered me the job at the end of the interview. She told me to think about it and to get back to her next week, she is going to be out of town on Friday for a long weekend. Looks like I may have a job in the fall after all.