| The previous post - about a month ago - said that I was pretty sure I had a new job. I did. But it's an amusing tale so I will share it. The last post was put up around midnight on Tuesday, January 31st. The previous day, Monday, started out looking pretty bleak. I had 2 days left in the month, lots of bills and basically no money. A few weeks previous, I had become a member of the Maloney's Rejects. The week before that, Rachel and I had both been sick with a fever for a week (being absent for a week contributed strongly to the Reject thing, to top it off). So we had missed something like 2/3rds of our income for the month, and didn't even have the nice buffer we expected out of what turned out to be a placid New Year's Night at Maloney's. I will unleash the bile I have stored up about that at another time. I got so desperate to find employment, I was going to be a DJ at TD's (a strip club). I applied for Unemployment and Food Stamps. But let's back up even more. A few days before even this, I found myself tutoring a grade-school kid about the physical properties of light (and Bernoulli's Principle also and how it powers flight). I decided I ought to look for a job tutoring at a Charter school (which doesn't require a teaching degree)... and promptly did not do that at all. At least not until the Monday that started our story. That Monday, I started calling all of the Charter schools in Tucson, in alphabetical order, and trying to find a job tutoring. One did decide to give me an interview the next day - BASIS [sic.] Tucson. So I showed up at BASIS Tucson, and was shooed in to talk to Olga Block, the director. Olga was from Eastern Europe, shrewd, and to the point. We talked about what educational experience I had - lots of individual tutoring in Okinawa, basically - and talked for about 20 minutes. She then told me that she didn't need me in Tucson, or for that matter to teach any of the subjects I had listed. She wanted me up in Scottsdale to teach kids there Art. She wanted me there as soon as possible, and sent me to check out the Art class in that school. During the meeting, I got a phone call from the Unemployment Office, who wanted to interview me to verify eligibility. Obviously, I never answered. I arranged to borrow AZ and Tasha's car (Rachel's being needed to get her to work and mine was still in the shop) and stay with my Grandfather-In-Law, Howard. He and his wife are ridicuously kind people - they are the same ones that put together that truck of Rachel's and gave it to us. I was to check out BASIS on Thursday, and do a demo lesson on Friday. This of course is an insanely tiny amount of time to put together a lesson, but I did it. Turns out, though, that the regular teachers were the ones teaching the Art classes. Why? Well ... the short version goes something like this. Back in August, Mrs. Bae was a fine Art teacher who got pregnant and took her maternity leave. She had a few subs while she was gone, naturally. Then in October she came back ... and left just two weeks later when her husband was promoted and moved to L.A.. Then they got another teacher or two. The most recent one tripped on a backpack and smashed her head into a chair, suffering severe head trauma and bleeding all over the place to the horror of her class. Naturally, she wasn't going to teach for awhile and in the meantime the other teachers had taken turns on their breaks substituting. Howard and Anita (the grandparents in law) live in Peoria, and with rush-hour traffic I needed a full hour and a half and almost fifty miles of driving to get to work. This is not fun. I arrived on time on Thursday, though, and when I got there, there really wasn't an Art class to observe (what with the teachers not doing Art) - so I started teaching. I had to improvise 4 Art lessons with kids I'd never met in a situation I'd never been in. It was stressful but fun in a mad way and I made it through Thursday pretty well. That night, I had the "let's talk about God and politics" conversation with Howard and despite my comparatively wishy-washy stances on Christianity (I am Catholic, but not anywhere nearly as religious as he is as a Protestant), it went perfectly well. On Friday, I improvised several lessons and ... totally had the worst time with the one I had actually planned. Rather ironic, really, that the bosses (being Olga and the Director) saw my worst lesson. But they hired me anyway. Almost on a lark, and because so many had just ejected due to burnout. I think they could tell that I was ridiculously enthusiastic and not so subject to just bailing out on them. That night I drove down to Tucson quite elated, and came back up to Prescott to buy AZ & Tasha's new car (a '63 VW), and say hello to the in-laws who live there. The next Tuesday was my first day back, though I had to drive Rachel's truck all the time. Since then, I've been staying with my Mom who lives in a much more central location in Phoenix and my transit time went from and hour and a half to about 30 minutes. And of course now I have more things to talk about: the school, the kids, and so on but that will undoubtedly take up the next several entries... Labels: art, BASIS, debt, DJ, in-laws, Maloney's, money, school, Scottsdale, teaching |
