It wasn't terrible. I did the best I could. But I felt pretty unimpressive. Irving did a great job organizing the job fair. Everyone working it was very nice and helpful. But some of the teachers doing the interviews seemed bored... I hope it wasn't just me. I was friendly and honest and had some good things to say. No one did cartwheels over me, but I think it was okay. Most of the schools only had bilingual positions open so far. Teachers have until 30 days before the school year begins to notify their principals that they are leaving, so positions will continue to open all summer. The goal of today was to drop off some resumes and try to make a good impression.
I'm glad a bought a suit. It was hot a few times, but in the end, Brett really liked it on me, so it paid off =-) I was glad that I made portfolios, but no one looked at them today. They were only interested in resumes. It may or may not get looked at down the road when principals are looking through stacks of resumes. One school handed it right back to me when I handed it to her. She said "We just want resumes. We're trying to cut down on our paper intake." Really? You don't want the portfolio that I worked on for two weeks? Okay. Thanks a lot.
I talked to 5 schools. The way Irving does it is they give you 4 tickets that get you into interviews when you get there. Then you walk around and sign up for appointments at the schools that you want to talk to and you give them a ticket. Well, the first school that I wanted to talk to was telling everyone to keep their tickets because they didn't have any positions open, so they wanted us to save them for other schools. I thought that was really cool. I still wanted to talk to that school because it's where I went to elementary school, and I know that positions will open. But that left me with another ticket, so I ended up at 5 schools. I knew some teachers in some of the rooms, but I didn't get to talk to any of them. Blah. We were just sent to whatever desk was the next available.
My plan was to leave a resume at every school, but when I was ready to do that, some of the schools were already packing up to go. Darn.
I understand limiting how many people we can talk to. Because so many people show up, it's impossible for every applicant to talk to every school. But if some schools were packing up at 2:30, they could have seen more people. Make it 8-5, not 9:30-2:30. That was my only complaint though. They fed us tasty sandwiches for lunch at no charge, and they let people park somewhere else and shuttled them to the school when the parking lot was full.
That's how many people were there. I got there an hour early and there were probably 150 people in line in front of me and they were directing cars to the parking lots at the nearby college. I decided a couple of days ago to have Brett drop me off because it was supposed to rain today. I remember last year seeing people walk from surrounding buildings in the rain. I didn't want that to happen. So he dropped me off and that made a huge difference! I'm glad that I wasn't late because I was walking from the college down the street!
Thanks to everyone who gave me advice and encouragement these last few months. I took it one step at a time, and this was the final step that I had a plan for. After today, I'm really just guessing. After seeing how many people were there today, talking to schools with no positions available, I think I should go ahead and apply at other districts. Irving is really where I want to be and the man said that before the next school year, they would hire 2-300 new teachers, so not to be discouraged by the crowd, but still... I've been saying all along that if I don't get hired I will just sub, but financially, that would be really difficult for us. I think I would need to sub and work somewhere else part time. I would much prefer ONE job and I want that job to be teaching. I know that God has a plan. Marie told me to rest in the peace of that knowledge. That's my plan.
Thanks again. Hope everyone is enjoying the weekend. It's beautiful here. It was supposed to rain all day, but it was just barely starting to sprinkle when we left the job fair. It's still just barely sprinkling and there is a lovely breeze. I decided to go for a walk when I got home and I'm glad I did. It felt good. And the park was practically empty because people were expecting rain. Nice =-)
Peace out playas!
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