Hire

The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one. ~Oscar Wilde

I got an interview with the principal of a Memphis high school last Wednesday evening, which I scheduled for late Thursday afternoon. After I told my mom about it, she looked up the school and called me to express her concerns. "Your school only gets 3 out of 10 stars," she said, referring to one of a number of school rating websites out there. "There's a school a few miles away - 8 out of 10 stars." The implicit question being, of course, Why can't you teach there? (Upon further research, I found that Teach For America doesn't place corps members in that 8/10 school, so that answers that question.)

She may not have realized it, but she was pointing out the exact problem of disparity and injustice. (Let's just assume that this one site was reliable and provided a reasonable estimate of educational quality with it's starring system.) Why should schools only miles apart, with ostensibly the same local resources, in the same community and school district, be so different? Why should students only miles apart receive such different educational experiences and opportunities? (I know it's an unrealistic vision, but I really believe that school curricula should, in fact, be standardized across the country. At the very least, then you know all children are provided with the same academic opportunities, if not extracurricular and social.)

Anyway, the interview on Thursday never happened. I waited 30 minutes for a call that never came, ended up calling the woman who'd scheduled it between me and the principal, and realized either she was incredibly frazzled or just had no idea what was going on. Eventually, my interview got rescheduled for Saturday afternoon (according to the principal, she had wanted to schedule her own interviews, but the scheduler lady insisted on scheduling them for her even though she didn't know the principal's schedule), which I was pretty surprised about. I mean, I know jobs in the education profession are hardly Monday-Friday, 9-5, but I didn't realize principals and teachers would actually conduct interviews outside of regular hours.

My interview was with the principal and a math teacher at the high school. It was much shorter than I had anticipated; I had definitely overprepared, scribbling pages and pages of notes in a steno pad based on the questions in the interview prep document I had received from Teach For America Memphis. At the end, the principal said she would call me later that day with a decision. I later saw that she'd called me just six minutes after my interview ended, but I had missed it on the way to pick up Flip from art class, and so we ended up playing phone tag until Sunday afternoon, when she offered me the job! Win. (Why is it that I think I'm better at expressing myself on paper than in person, and yet I fail to get things I write applications for all the time but have never been turned down for anything I've interviewed for?)

There have been some frustrating things about this whole process which I have already vented to enough people about, but I know that I am lucky to have a job already, lucky to have this experience ahead of me, and I know that I will have much more trying times in the future, so what's a little miscommunication or confusion? Nothing I can't handle. Plus, I've always found that every unsatisfactory interaction I have with people just teaches me what not to do or how not to act. Real world learning experience right there.

What was incredibly satisfying - though rather anticlimactic - was submitting my thesis online yesterday. Katie submitted my signatory page for me today, after which she texted, "Consider yourself 'gonged,'" which made me smile. So after 7,400 words on 48 pages based on 3 semesters and half a summer of research, I am done with college and can officially graduate with honors. No finals, no papers, just three and a half weeks between me and a medal and a diploma.