Why hello fellow readers! It has been a while since I sat down an attempted to share my educational insights and stories with those of the blogosphere! The reason for my hiatus has been my lack motivation to keep a teacher blog when I am not teaching!! As barely mentioned in the previous post I lost my job and have forever been searching for a new one.
With this thought in my head I decided to blog out my feelings of economy as well as my job search and the less than stellar results I am having!
Everyone is quite aware the economy has not been going strong and with this in mind everything, including schools, suffer. Education has never been one of the country's highest funded entities. After all, what kind of money and revenue do children bring to the table? Last I checked it was a worthless enterprise. Personally I feel we should save the nation’s money for bailouts, spilling oil and huge commercial chains and advertisements. Did that come off as sarcastic? It was meant to…my lack of career at this point has left me a bit bitter.
Actually I have spent this time off brainstorming ideas on how to make the United States education system a bit more profitable. I came up with this killer idea…you ready for it?
ADVERTISING! When has advertising not worked? We are surrounded by it everyday and it essentially controls our lives as American consumers. As a teacher I would be more than happy to sport the national flag of Kellogg directly next to the American flag. I am practically dying to throw on a jump suit clad in Eggo Waffles and Pepsi labels. Hell, if this keeps me employed the big businesses can even take domain of my classroom bulletin board, which anyone in the know, understands how particular I am about my bulletin boards! Lets be honest, this tactic worked for NASCAR. You can try to convince me otherwise, but I am pretty sure no one actually watches NASCAR for the sporting event itself.
I digressed slightly from reality and my plan was not to do so. To be more on topic, teaching is a highly saturated field, at least in St. Louis and our surrounding areas. We have four large universities in STL alone that boast being “Teacher Schools” as well as two other large universities that I am sure offer the same degree. We then have the large state schools strewn about the Missouri that also feed heavily into STL upon graduation. On the other hand, STL also has numerous schools that are constantly closing. St. Louis Public Schools have been on a downward spiral for a long time and they are the biggest district we have to work with in this community.
I know I am the teacher here, but you can do the math. St. Louis is being force fed teachers with no place to go. I recently applied to a school district, one in which I had connections and did my student teaching. I felt this gave me a greater chance at scoring an interview at least. I talked with said connection and guess what? 488 teachers applied for the one job! My goodness with those numbers I will have to write my resume in Myspace Glitter Graphics just to be noticed!
To make matters worse, I am almost finished with my Masters degree. Schools do not want to hire someone who is already at salary step Bachelors +30! Sorry for the teacher talk but that’s a lot more money than they would have to pay a newbie fresh from college. However, if I look in other job fields I am told I have too many qualifications and would be better suited somewhere else? Where is that somewhere else???
Oh yeah…teaching, and let me tell you about the saturated teaching field…well this is just becoming a very circular tale and I am beginning to sound a bit like a NASCAR announcer…and they make another left turn!
