There is hope

I guess it can happen...the economy may be in the toilet, but it IS still possible to get the job of your dreams. Not me, not yet, but just the same, I was elated to hear that a friend of mine was able to get her dream job at a school that's walking distance from home. Yay! There is hope. She deserves it too--she's been a sub/temporary employee for 2 years, which is not something I would have ever seen coming for someone who's very capable and interested in what's typically a hard-to-fill niche of Special Education. It's not like she's in with the rest of the pack clamoring over precious Elementary Ed jobs (I've seen the lines at the job fair, and let me tell ya, the shortest line by far is for Special Education).

I'll probably have a better shot at my dream job (ESL) when I have the full endorsement. In the meantime, it looks like I'm going to be subbing, which has been pretty much of a non-event since there's a hungry horde of hyenas snatching up the few available scraps of work that there are. I can smell the jobs, but I can't even get near them. I must be scraping way at the very very bottom of the priority list for call outs since I never ever get called.

Incidentally, I had my first foray with a behavior class. Yes, I'm still doing a lot of Special Ed, and that's fine with me since I can't do what I want anyway. Special Ed, aside from being blatantly more fun, is a nice change of pace after spending a year dealing with nothing but mainstream kids. In spite of being relatively open-minded about Special Ed, in the past, I've always been rather intimidated by the "behavior" label and I've never been brave enough to pick up any of those jobs before. But last week, I spent part of a day in a behavior class. To my surprise it was way less intimidating than I thought. The kids were actually polite and very nice to me, although you could tell they were a bit lacking in the social skills department--but than again, the same could easily be said of a lot of other people. It was actually a lot of fun, and I'm better at it than I would have thought...I got a lot of complements on my ability to interact/engage with the kids effectively. I think in the future I'm going to go for it a bit more often.

Alas these moments are too few and too far in between. I've worked two days since September, so I'm painfully broke. I'm signed up with two large school districts, and one probably hasn't even finished processing my paperwork yet, so of course I'm not getting calls from them. The other district has been pretty quiet this year.

On the plus side, my mom is coming to visit in two weeks, so I have time to get the house in order before she gets here. Now if I could just get motivated to actually do it. I'd rather spend a week with juvenile delinquents than one afternoon of cleaning...