Part One
Part Two
Seeing each other occurred much more than I anticipated. I thought he'd be so neck deep in school work I'd never see him. However, most weekends we met up at my parents house. He came for a week at Mardi Gras, which fell on my birthday, and surprised me with an iPad as a birthday/graduation gift.../Christmas/Valentine's/every other gift for quite a while ha! We Skyped when he wasn't here or I wasn't there.
Once during that Spring semester I made the trip down and stayed in the dorm (totally sneaking around because I wasn't supposed to stay, he could get kicked out for having girl stay the night...even his wife) for a few days so that I could begin my job hunt. Let's face it, his whole graduate school funding was bought to you in part by my teaching career, a graduate assistant position, and viewers like you. (I couldn't sleep and watched lot of PBS last night.) Home girl had to find a job, or else I'd be kicking it at Micky D's flipping burgers. I went to no less than 5 school boards, emailed a lot more, and had my Louisiana Teacher profile thing set up to put my application in at every school with in a 45 miles radius of Thibodaux.
Finding my first teaching job was stressful enough, I wasn't hired until a day or so before the annual teacher meeting began for that year. I expected the same this go around as well. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't just me being negative...it is just realistic to not get hired as a teacher before July.
After talking to the personal director in the parish we planned to live in the possibilities of getting a job looked grim. I was told there was not a need for 1-5 certified teachers, they were a dime a dozen. I should get certified in high school and I'd have a better chance. The economy was bad here (mostly fishing and off shore) and they had let go 500 teacher/school positions since 2009. She (the personal director) also wouldn't give me a vacancy list because already hired teachers had the right to it first, not some new to the area graduate student. In my brainstorming I decided to email a friend who teaches here and ask her what to do...she emailed me back with the vacancy list!
Can we say life changing! I immediately emailed all the principals and quickly heard back from one, and only one. She set up and interview...in April (that never happens), and I took a personal day for that day to drive the 10 hours round trip in one day to do it.
But let me digress...
Remember how bad my current job was sucking at the time? Well the principal at that school got word that my husband was in graduate school way down south and forced me to resign in March. Oh course she kept me working until the last teacher day...but forced me to resign none the less. With that being done I thought it was no problem to tell her I had an interview and wanted to take a personal day (we got 2 and I had not used either) to go to it. I packed my bags and thought I'd be leaving for the weekend to see Jeremy and go on an interview only to come to school the day before the conference to be told she was declining my personal day request.
She didn't say it that nice though, her words were more "I'm not giving you the day off and you're wasting your time going because they will never hire you anyway. You can still take off against my decline but you will need a letter of recommendation when you get there and I will make sure you get a bad one."
I am not one to cry, and definitely not in front of my students, but I broke down. I had to leave the room for quite a long time before I could get it together too. I had never had a bad observation before teaching for her, and while she was saying I was horrible my professor who observed me gave me almost perfect scores every time. I had no idea what to do. With the guidance of a few JBHM ladies (who were there helping revamp the school) and a ton of other teachers I decided to wait until that Monday and sign out after giving the first part of the state standardized test and go anyway. Forget that crazy woman I needed a job!
I packed my car and to the interview 5 minutes before it started (driving straight there). I interviewed, terrified out of my mind to a panel of 10 women. Got in the car, said hey to Jeremy and didn't get back to Monroe until 1am.
This post is getting long so I am going to leave y'all hanging:) and pick back up tomorrow.
What's the craziest thing a boss has ever told you?
