Job Search

Recently I was seduced to the dark side of the internet. I embraced my destiny as a total loss and joined Facebook. And a little while ago, I posted a status update:

"Don Gwinn is looking for a new job."

That brought some concerned phone calls and some guessing, and in retrospect, I suppose if your mother-in-law is a Facebook friend, you should probably call her before you post such an announcement. Many of my friends have asked whether I was laid off, a natural thought in today's economy.

I'm not going to say a lot about the details on the internet, but I'll say this: I resigned from my position, but I'm not necessarily leaving teaching. I'm going to put in at some other places and see what happens. I'd like to stay in special education, but if there's someone in the area who would like to have a regular-education elementary or middle-school teacher who's "Highly Qualified" in math, science, social studies and language arts, AND has an intimate firsthand knowledge of special-education mandates, AND knows how an IEP is intended to work inside and out, AND has years of experience as a classroom teacher, a direct-instruction special-education teacher, and as a co-teacher in an inclusion classroom including kids with and without IEP's . . . . well, I'm available. I'm also experienced in the assessment/records required by the new coming Response To Intervention (RTI) standards, especially in reading fluency and reading comprehension.

Because of the way I have my pay schedule structured, my pay from my current employer won't change until the end of the coming summer, so I have some time to find something else. I'm going to be applying at a lot of places in the next month to try to beat their early hiring deadlines, but it wouldn't be surprising if it took a lot longer at some places, since there's always a lot of last-minute hiring over the summer.

So, among my assets, I have an early start, a lot of varied experience, and the experience I gained from working for a district that was getting a real jump on the new legal mandates that haven't taken effect yet.

Among my liabilities? Well, I have a wheelbarrow, but there's not a holocaust cloak to be found in this country. Also, rumor has it that a relatively large number of other special-ed personnel were or soon will be released from the same district--which means a lot of competition for those special-ed openings. Still, I'm more flexible than a lot of other people out there, and that's an advantage.

What I should do is write the great American novel and put all this sordid working-class nonsense behind me. I have this great idea for a story about a colorful band of guns-for-hire who hunt mythical monsters for a living . . . . . oh, right.