“Your posts on this thread seem to say a lot of different things. I am trying to figure out if you were in school for 12 years”
I was in college when I turned 18, scrimped and saved to go. Finished three years of it off a combination of scholarships and working summers. I worked as a treeplanter, and then moved to a different job the next year as a delivery driver.
As much as I scrimped, I couldn’t afford to go and finish off my degree. So I went back to work. Found a bunch of different jobs, all part-time, all contract work, and kept saving up so that I could eventually go back to school, and finish up my last year.
The reason I’ve worked so many jobs is that I temped, and was always willing to do whatever it took. Rather then turn down work because it was something different, I’d take it on, do my best, work until the end of the contract, and not get renewed.
“why are you working odd jobs when if the teaching thing isn’t working out you are not looking to another career.”
It took me two years to get where I am now, where I am teaching part time. I worked really hard to get this job, and I am reluctant to start over again and go back to school, and do something completely different.
I have been applying for full time positions, but haven’t had my breakthrough yet.
Maybe you can afford to go back to school, but I can’t, I have to work and it was hard enough for me to make enough money to go the first time. If I go back and do something completely different, I’ll be 4 more years behind and still no further ahead.
“That kind of admission makes me wonder what is wrong with you besides your attitude?”
I have a hearing disability, and as a teacher, few are willing to hire a teacher with a hearing disability, irrespective of experience and qualifications. I have been told that I should teach deaf kids and deaf students, which isn’t very helpful when I am looking for positions to teach regular students.
I’m very good at what I do - my current employer is quite happy having hired me, I just want to get full time with them, but there hasn’t been a slot opened up yet. We did a major curriculum revision and I was helping train the full time teachers, which is part of why I was brought on in the first place.
But it’s all seniority - I’m the only teacher under 50.
[have been told that I should teach deaf kids and deaf students, which isn’t very helpful when I am looking for positions to teach regular students.]
Does your hearing disability impair the ability of non-deaf children to learn?
Well forgive my bluntness, but my children are not in the classroom to give you a job.
They're there to learn - and that means asking questions, lots of them, even when the public employee they're in the care of isn't positioned to read their lips.
Now, maybe you've come up a novel means of overcoming your limitations - if so, good for you. But you'd damned well better've demonstrated it works and have earned the responsibility for teaching my kids -- because if you get yourself Affirmative Actioned into a position that impairs them, I'll make it my full-time hobby to fix that. Clear?
Temp. jobs and contract jobs may pay the bills, but you are learning the hard lesson is that they don't build careers if they are not in your field of expertise.
In the late 1970’s I started work as a cashier for a toy store, moved out at 18 and got a second job working at McDonalds. The weekend job was cashier for a drug store. Plus, I was still getting a few classes in at the time too. I did for several years and eventually got my business degree and went on to manage the drug store, spring boarded from there to a clothing company, built a $300,000 store into a million dollar store in 3 years and got promoted to a district manager of 15 stores.
Then the world crashed in 1996. I got up and started over again. Like my first post says I started over with the clothes on my back. I made more than my husband, so I paid him...the cheat.
While in pursuit of my second degree, I interned in my chosen field at a chemical company. It was a really crummy internship for a lot of reasons, but in my second year a management position opened up and I was asked to take it(at the time I was working as a bank teller, intern for the chemical co., and going back to school). Why would an intern get an EHS management position? Because I also understood business management, which was more than the kids coming out of college understood with their 4 year degree. 5 years later I was the field manager decommissioning two nuclear reactors for NASA. Today I run my retirement business. Yes, you read that correctly, my retirement business. You see I totally understand and was informed since the 1980's I would never see my SS contributions and millions of people were herded in IRA's and 401K's, but like my life demonstrates...I don't herd easily. I figured I would have to work in some capacity into my grave and having put in my long hours working and learning and career building for someone else, I decided it was time to really do it for myself. If I had learned that lesson much earlier in life, I think my life now would be much easier and better. So while my comments seem harsh to you, realize now, before it is too late...that ultimately it is up to you. It is not about 'who will give me the job.' When things were tough I didn't sit around and cry because they closed the toy store or my position got eliminated or even that my world literally crashed with the sudden death of my father, the loss of my mother 6 months later, and a divorce finalized 3 months after that... Who you are today is not who you were 12 years ago. If you've been doing the same thing for 12 years and not getting the results you want...then change what you are doing. What else can a history teacher do than teach at a school? How about historical sites as a history interpreter? How about a history tutor? Or a field history instructor for homeschoolers?