Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Got another employment rejection this morning -- the school in question doesn't have housing for a family of four. We'll add that to "we need someone who can coach," "the teacher decided not to leave after all," "we decided to suck your brain dry during the interview process and use it to arm an in-house interim candidate," and the ubiquitous "we had many qualified candidates" as my least favorite phrases in the English language.

Batting average so far: 0 for 23. Two schools still holding my application materials, and an average of one new opportunity a week coming my way. Six weeks left in the school year, eight until we get kicked out of our school housing, and twelve weeks until my severance pay runs out. Is it any wonder I'm not holding my breath?

In addition, I learned this week that no one even notices if I go to work or not. That skipping work does not result in a "service gap" isn't really a surprise, since mostly I spend four hours a day sitting in the information commons blogging and checking email, and writing jobsearch cover letters. But I guess I expected that some of my coworkers would have noticed.

Meanwhile, I've started getting all sorts of requests from teachers for instruction and classroom partnering in the mornings. But I'm not supposed to do that, because someone decided my half-time paternity leave is better spent sitting in the information commons at a time of day when most students aren't thinking about classes or homework...and when the ones who aren't hanging out playing frisbee are in organized sports, anyway.

Look. I am an extraordinarily multitalented teacher. I can teach -- have taught -- pretty much every subject (except languages) for any age, including metateaching for teachers looking to improve their teaching. I have taught in informal and formal environments, museums and schools. I'm more qualified to teach English, History, Communications, and Technology Education in engaging and student-centered ways than 99% of the candidates out there.

I want to teach. I like to teach. I like to teach ninth graders.

I'm an expert in getting kids to think, in helping them become independent learners who love to learn, and in helping them attain the cruicial epiphanies that make their whole world come crashing together.

And I want to live with them, in a dorm. Because I firmly believe, after seven stable years in the same damn boarding school environment, that students learn best (and teachers teach best) when school isn't something you walk away from after seven hours each day.

Instead, I spend four hours a day sitting at a desk fiddling with my brain, sending infinite amounts of text out into the anonymous and unforgiving ether, while my wife struggles with a terrible two and a tiny infant in a home that, to be honest, we should be packing up right about now.

There's nothing I hate more than a pointless existence.

Please help make my life purposeful.

Hire me. Now, if possible.

Or call my supervisors and tell them that I was right when I told them, going into the paternity leave, that I was needed in the mornings, which would then give me follow-up work to do in the afternoons.

Or, if not, let me go home, damnit, so I can enjoy the last weeks with my newly-expanded family in the intimate privacy of our temporary home.