I have been unemployed for exactly five work days as I type this blog post. My former job as a paraeducator meant that I was working Monday through Friday, and was off on Saturday and Sunday. So, to me, right now it feels like five days. In reality, my last day of work was September 25, 2009, which means I have actually been unemployed for nine days now.
I’ve been reading the handy little pamphlet I got from the government concerning Unemployment Insurance. To summarize, it says that in order to continue to receive Unemployment Insurance, one of the things you must do is continue to look for work. It sounds pretty simple, on paper.
In reality? I’ve been reading articles like this one. In a Reuters article titled “Stimulus Can’t Ease Job Pain for U.S. States and Cities”, Lisa Lambert notes that things are bad, and aren’t going to get better anytime soon. This article was written on Friday, October 2nd, 2009.
Some poignant quotes from that article include:
* “Even after receiving billions of dollars of stimulus funds, state governments lost 10,000 jobs — all in education — and the trend may get worse in coming months.”
* “Since May, states have shed 49,000 jobs. In September, they lost 15,600 education positions while gaining 5,500 jobs in other areas, in an indicator of how stretched states’ finances are, Scheppach said.”
* “The picture was even worse for local government jobs in September. Cities and counties shed 37,000 positions — with education losing 13,400 of those jobs.”
* “At least one state, California, is pressing for a second stimulus package.”
This is after California already cut a bunch of teacher’s jobs back in March. They handed out so many pink slips, it was referred to as “Pink Friday”. If you don’t know what I mean, read this article from Fox News.
I can look all day and night for another teaching job, but those jobs are rapidly disappearing. At the same time, more and more teachers are becoming unemployed, and searching for the same jobs I am.
In many ways, I am feeling lied to. I feel like my school district lied to me when they hired me for this school year, just to take my job away less than a month later with no notice, and no stated reason why. I feel like my college professors and advisors lied to me when they told me to “get a B.S. in education, and you will be sure to find a job as a teacher after you graduate”. I feel like every adult who told me when I was a child that “hard work will get you to your goals” lied to me as well, because even as I was being fired, I was told that they “appreciated the hard work” I had done for them. I feel lied to by the government, whose stimulus package that was supposed to create jobs failed to do so. I am certain that I am not the only teacher who feels like this right now, in this second season this year of education job cuts.
So, do I bother to search for work in the field my degree is in, and attempt to teach again? Or, do I just take a “desperation job” and hope against all reason that there is something out there I have the job skills to do other than teaching? This might not be a choice I have the ability to make, if all the jobs in education are already gone, and are not expected to come back anytime soon.
As I write this, part of me really wants to take my teaching degree that no longer seems to be worth the paper it is written on in the United States, and leave. I want to believe that there is a country out there that not only values American teachers, but also places a high value on education itself. You know, like the United States claims to, but, as the world can see by all these cuts to education… truly doesn’t care in the slightest.
Tags: Unemployment Insurance, work