Posts Tagged: work

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9
Aug 10

Have I got a deal for you!

As a person who is still receiving (much needed) Unemployment Insurance Benefits, I am always looking for ways to save money. I follow sales, shop at thrift stores, buy store brand groceries, and seek out coupons. All of these practices are great ways to save some money.

Some of you already know that I have been working as a freelance writer since January. A few weeks ago, I was given the opportunity to become a blogger for Families.com. I am not an employee; this is still “contract” or freelance work. Overall, it equates to a part time job, and is more regular than what I was doing previous to this opportunity.

So far… I love it! I write for three of their blogs: Insurance, Genealogy, and Deals. It is the Deals blog that I think unemployed people, or people who need to save money, will be the most interested in. Right now, I am writing new articles for the Deals blog five days a week, (and am adding new content daily in each of the other two blogs).

If you want to find out about sales, free offers, contests, and discounts, check out the Deals blog at Families.com. I am not the only contributor to this blog, but I do contribute quite a bit.

From there, you can click on my name and find all the other articles I have written for Families.com if you are interested.

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22
Jun 10

Thoughts on job hunting

This is from “Tales of Mere Existence”:

This is from “I Can Haz Cheezburger”:
employable

This is from FOUND:
12jobs

I’ve been putting a little extra effort into finding a job this week. Several of the people who care about me have suggested that it’s not the smartest idea in the world to just tell the EDD to &%#@ off when they call me in a few days. I can see the wisdom in letting cooler heads prevail, but it doesn’t make me happy.

In short, I have what equates to a part time job right now. The freelance writing is going pretty well, for someone who hasn’t even been doing it a year yet. However, Shawn, (he who understands how to balance a checkbook, how much the bills cost, and other numerically related things that my dyslexic brain cannot comprehend), tells me that the pittance of random money I am occasionally getting from the EDD is something we actually need. Which means, if I am going to be able to tell the EDD to stick it, I’d have to find a second job.

Now, it would only have to be a part time job, but this still doesn’t please me. I, like the character in the video above, started thinking about what kind of job I could likely get. Mostly, this is making me depressed. When I was in college, I worked three jobs at the same time, while taking classes, and was always exhausted and miserable. Back then, I told myself that this was temporary. Once I got my degree, I wouldn’t need to work multiple jobs to get by anymore. That was the whole point of getting my degree. Now, here I am, with a degree, hoping that I can pick up a second part time job in order to survive. The difference? I’m not a student anymore, and I’m much older now. It’s depressing.

So, as I said, I started thinking about the kind of job I could likely get, like the guy in the video above. Teaching is a dead end, especially now that it is summer. I used to work in a bookstore, so I went into a small, Christian bookstore recently, to see if they might hire me part time. Nope, they aren’t hiring at all right now. In fact, the worker I spoke with seemed a bit miffed that when she asked me if I needed anything, I asked for a job, instead of a book, or DVD, or CD, or something that I was going to purchase.

When I was seventeen, I used to bag groceries. So, I called up a local grocery store, to see if they were hiring baggers. This is a corporate owned chain, so I basically got Colonel Klink on the phone (“I Know Nott-ing!”). I was told I could go online, search through their website, and fill out an application. This, I know from working retail, is code for: “No, we aren’t hiring right now, but Corporate doesn’t like it when we tell people that, so we are going to give you this vague, “corporate speak” answer, and string you along, instead”.

My biggest fear is that whatever part time job I get will result in very bad things. I am afraid that they will require me to work on the days that my husband has off, and that we will never, ever, again get to spend any time together, or do anything fun together. Or, the part time job will mess up my allergies, (most workplaces manage to do this), and I will once again be too sick to do anything fun on my days off. The alternative to that is to pump myself full of allergy medication in order to make it through the workday, and go back to being a zombie. (Which makes my brain work just like the brain of the person who wrote the unfinished list from FOUND).

If I become this sick, or this drugged, it will be impossible to do any decent writing. Which means that the supplemental part time job that I don’t want will result in me losing the part time writing job that I really enjoy, and hope to make a career out of.

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16
Jun 10

Saw that one coming

Remember a few months ago, when “economists” were gleefully proclaiming that the unemployment problem was getting better, because of all the new jobs that were added that month? They were specifically talking about the jobs that were added because the government needed a bunch of people to go door to door, and make sure everybody filled out their census papers. They also needed people to compile those statistics, and stuff like that.

I blogged about it when that was in the news. I commented that none of these “economists”, whoever they were, seemed to be able to see what I knew we were going to be facing a few months down the road. It was obvious to me that the thousands of people who found employment as a direct result of the census were actually “seasonal hires”, not people who had found a reliable, consistent, and well paying new career. Which meant that they would be unemployed once again, in a few short months, and adding to the statistics about how many people were unemployed. To me, it seemed that the census jobs were not a solution. Instead, they were a band aid, slapped over a hemorrhaging wound. How could anyone have thought that seasonal work was going to fix things?

Well, it looks like a writer for the Huffington Post had the same thoughts as me. On June 4, 2010, they posted an article called Unemployment: U.S. Economy Added 431K Jobs In May, But Vast Majority Came From Census Hires. Go read the article for full details.

In short, things went exactly as I predicted they would go. The need for census workers dried up, tons of people lost their jobs, and the unemployment rate increased. American businesses still aren’t hiring, in part because they don’t trust that the economy has recovered enough for them to safely afford new workers. There are people who have been unemployed for so long that they have given up looking for work, which means that they aren’t even included in the unemployment statistics.

In other words, no matter how much the Federal Government hoped, it is simply not possible to solve the unemployment problem by hiring thousands of seasonal workers for a few months. We need real jobs! We need jobs that pay well enough for a person to make a decent living from, without having to pick up a part time job for supplemental income. We need jobs that lead to actual careers, that come with health benefits, retirement plans, and paid sick days. We need employers who value employees who work hard, are reliable, and good at what they do more than they value new, untrained, high schoolers who they can pay much less per hour.

It is not acceptable for the government to hand out what basically equates to a “summer job”, in an effort to try and trick people that the economy is getting better. Census jobs = a big fat FAIL!

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12
Jun 10

Perceptions

It’s interesting how this current epidemic of unemployment has affected people’s perceptions about jobs and the kinds of people who work them. How quickly we got used to seeing stores close, forever, in the blink of an eye, laying off tons of employees, often with no notice.

There is an excellent blog called Not Always Right , which makes me laugh. Workers send in their experiences dealing with rotten, stupid, or completely confused customers, who are “not always right”. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to work retail, or with the general public in some other line of work, will relate to this blog, and laugh…. and then cry.

Lately, I’ve noticed a few posts on that blog that deal with the perceptions that people have about work that I found surprising.

Supermarket

Yep, only “old or retarded” people work at the supermarket. What kind of parent teaches that to their young child? Apparently, the same kind of parent who thinks that the word “retarded” is not at all offensive. Let’s hope the parents of this kid don’t lose their jobs, and end up bagging groceries. Oh, and years later when this kid is old enough to try and find a job…. good luck getting him to take one at a supermarket.

Closing

“Wow, they didn’t tell you yet?” How sad is this? We have gotten so used to seeing stores disappear that a clearance sale makes people question how long the store will remain in existence. Also, it isn’t unusual for a company to be closing, and to specifically hide that information from it’s employees.

Dropout

In a world where people with college degrees cannot find work, how can this person possibly believe that her Pharmacist is a high school drop out? Oh, wait.. she doesn’t believe in Pharmacists. Crazy.

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8
Jun 10

Thoughts on the night before

It is after midnight, and I am awake. Later today, in about… thirteen hours or so, I have to put up with yet another mandatory telephone interview with the EDD. I am anxious, and angry, and deeply resenting the fact that I have to do this third telephone interview in the nine months since I have been on Unemployment Insurance Benefits.

I have not yet decided if I am going to verbally destroy whichever minion of the EDD is unfortunate enough to call me up and harass me via telephone in a few hours time. Every fiber of my being is urging me to just rip them a new one. However, the logical side of me warns that it is not advisable to say anything on a recorded phone call with a government worker that could be in any way considered a threat. In about half a days time, we get to find out which side of me wins out. I may have to resort to giving them one word answers, and trying extremely hard to not make that one word be something profane and obscene.

If I sleep, I will just end up having nightmares, and wake up even more stressed out than I am right now. I will dream that the EDD has decided to cut off my benefits, with no warning, leaving me scrambling to try and replace the small amount of money they occasionally would give me. I will have nightmares that the EDD has decided that I wasn’t eligible for benefits in the first place, and is demanding that I pay them back the money they sent me, all of it, right this second. Sleep is futile.

Instead, I am online, writing this blog, and surfing the net, trying to distract myself. Here is an article from my local newspaper, The Tribune. It has the cheerful, and hope giving title of: For many, recovery means lower expectations. As always, I recommend you read the article to get the full story. For this article, it is especially true.

This article points out that the Federal Government has been saying for months now that “the Recession is over”. This is being said as if it is a good thing. It seems to me that the members of the Federal Government who have been saying such nonsense are unaware that the reason that the Recession is over, and has been over for many months, is because we in a Depression.

This article tells story after story of people who worked hard, went to school, and got their degree, their masters, or learned their trade. These people all lost their jobs, many with no warning, and have been struggling to avoid homelessness ever since. Many of them have families with young children to care for. All of these people have had to lower their expectations, and take jobs that pay much, much, much less than a person who has earned a degree should have to take. These people are working hourly jobs, that offer no benefits, and pitifully low wages.

A man with a masters degree in business is now bagging groceries. A chiropractor has had to settle for a job in a museum, that only relates to his field of study in the vaguest possible way. A welder who was earning enough to have a large home for his family to live in loses his job, has to sell the home, and has to move the family into an apartment where the children share rooms, (and beds), and the parents sleep on the floor. His wife has gone from being a stay at home mom to working at a car wash, for a low hourly wage. A man with a degree in advertising ends up stocking shelves at a big chain retail store. It’s enough to make a person want to cry. There still aren’t enough jobs to go around. The jobs that exist are bad ones, that will not pay a person enough to live on. Forget getting health insurance, paid sick days, or a retirement plan. That seems to be a thing of the past.

This blog is from a man named Danny, who lives in Chicago, Illinois. He succinctly describes how impossible the Illinois Department of Employment Security has made it for people to file for Unemployment Insurance. Apparently, this particular governmental organization hates Mac computers, and has a phone system that is as frustrating as the one here, in California. To me, this is one more example of how the Federal Government is going out of it’s way to intentionally make it as difficult as possible for it’s citizens to get the help they need, from the money they paid into the system for years and years and years.

I still look at the jobs on Craigslist. People are becoming so desperate to find work that they are using the job list as a place to post their cries for help. They write down what they are qualified to do, and what skills they have, and hope someone out there will be able to hire them.

Here is the latest example of that. The job title is “Need a Nanny?”
“Looking for a quality person to take care of your child/ren? I have 4+ years of nanny experience, and am a mom of a 16 month old boy myself. I am a former teacher, experience teaching grades K-8. Since I am a mom, I understand completely what a huge decision it is as to whom you choose to entrust your child/ren to during the week while you work. I’ve been a stay-at-home-mom for the past 16 months and would continue to do things like take the kids to the beach, park, gymnastics (it’s open gym) and pool. I would be willing to come to your house, as long as you would be ok with me bringing my 16 month old son with me. I’d be available to take care of your child anytime M-F, whatever hours necessary. Price would factor age and how many kids, hours, etc. If you’re interested, please email me at (her email address was here) and once I find out a bit more about your situation, I can give you a price quote. I’d also be happy to email you my resume and references and meet in person.

A former teacher with four years of experience as a nanny cannot find work. There is another person posting that he is able to translate signs and flyers, (as well as anything else a company may need) from English to Spanish, if only someone would hire him.

The rest is filled with absolute crap.
* “Become a SURROGATE MOTHER and Earn up to $45,000″ This appears in the job list often. I believe they are serious, because they list details about the age and health of the woman they are willing to pay to do this.

* SALES REP OPENINGS
NOW HIRING

MARKETING SERVICE INC now has seats available for the best. For local and long distance company Come join the team, must have some sales experience and want to make money.
If this sounds like you,come show us what you’ve got
paid weekly, hours m-f
Submit resume and hours available

The pay for that job is listed as “hourly on a sliding scale”
Translation: They want someone to work as a telemarketer, and do cold calling, and who is gullible enough to believe that they can reach the impossibly high sales quota that is necessary to hit if they stand any hope of making more than minimum wage.

* Help a Couple Fulfill their DREAMS of Parenthood – Become an EGG DONOR” This seems to be a different company than the previous one that wanted egg donors.

*TUTORS NEEDED
This is the same tutoring place that keeps advertising, as if it was a good job. As near as I can tell, Grade Potential pays it’s workers based on how many students they are able to tutor. There doesn’t seem to be any guarantee of hours, or rate of pay, or even that there will be pay. This company has a booth at the local weekly Farmer’s Market. I have often wondered if the result of applying for this job is to end up sitting in the booth at Farmer’s Market, handing out flyers.

All those jobs were posted today. The Federal Government may have deluded itself into believing that things are getting better, but, all the evidence I can find says it is getting worse.

Knowing this, I cannot imagine what I am suppose to say to the EDD minion who calls me in several hours time, when he or she asks why I haven’t found a full time job yet. They should be calling to give me compliments, because I have been working what essentially amounts to a part time job for most of the time that I have been on Unemployment Insurance, something few people are lucky enough to have done. Instead, I have a feeling they are going to try and make me feel bad because I am not teaching. I think they are going to try and make me feel as if the freelance writing that I have been doing since January isn’t “real work”, and that I am lazy and stupid for not getting something they consider “better”. Better doesn’t exist. “Real jobs” have gone extinct.

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6
Jun 10

Random

I decided to post a few random things that I’ve been meaning to post here. All of them have to something to do with unemployment.

Here’s one I “borrowed” from Post Secret
librarynote

Watch the United States rot, like a piece of moldy bread:

That is one striking visual aid, showing just how bad things have gotten.

The Northwest Herald published an article called Algonquin man charged in fed benefits case. Algonquin is a town in Illinois. The Northwest Herald is an Illinois newspaper.

In short, this article is about a 36 year old man who is one of eleven people who have been charged with “fraudulently obtaining unemployment insurance benefits”. Each of these people (allegedly) “lied about their eligibility for benefits”. They claimed that they were unemployed, when they were not. These people actually had jobs, that to me, appear to have been full time jobs. One was a bricklayer. Two of them worked for the U.S. Postal Service. And now, they will be going to court, and quite possibly to prison.

Ok, first of all, it’s clearly wrong to lie about being unemployed, in order to get benefits that you aren’t eligible for…. because you have a full time job! What kind of people choose to do that? The bigger question, in my mind, is this: How come the Illinois version of the EDD didn’t catch the fraud when it happened?

Two days from now, I have to go through my third telephone interview with the California EDD, to continue to prove to them that I have been telling the truth about when and where I worked, and how much money I made. I’ve been reporting all of that to the EDD truthfully, and still, this is the third time in nine months that the EDD has decided to withhold my benefits, so I can appease their paranoid little souls, once again. How come those eleven people in Illinois were able to just get unemployment benefits, (that they did not deserve), without having to deal with all of the harassment that I, an honest person, have had to deal with?

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19
May 10

More school cuts

It never seems to end.

The San Luis Tribune has an article called Atascadero Unified School District to lay off seven non-teaching employees.

San Luis Unified School District did it, and then did it again. Lucia Mar District just did it, and now, Atascadero Unified School District is doing it too. I’m pretty sure this is all of the school districts that are nearby to where I live. It’s a good thing I have decided not to ever teach again! Who wants to work in a career that continually cuts jobs?

Read the article for full details. I am just putting some of the key points here.

* “Seven people will lose their jobs, including a secretary, a receptionist, a career counselor and two interpreters for the deaf. Four other employees – two accountants and two librarians – will see their hours cut.”

Gee, I hope there aren’t any deaf students attending Atascadero Unified School District. There goes their help! Things are getting pretty sick when schools think it is morally acceptable to take away the jobs of people who are there to help the deaf students communicate with others.

Oh, and I guess the students in that school district don’t need a career counselor to help guide them into what to do after they graduate high school. We all know there aren’t enough jobs to go around anyway.

Cutting the hours of the librarians means that less students will be able to access the books and other materials in the library in case they want to…. I don’t know… study? Write a paper? Learn stuff? You know, the the kinds of things that the schools are supposed to be helping students to do.

I’m not sure exactly what the accountants do, but I have a feeling that having less accountants is a bad idea. Oh, wait…. unless the school has so few employees working there now that they no longer need as many accountants to work on handing out paychecks.

But wait… it gets worse!
*”Atascadero Unified is also eliminating four vacant positions.”
*POOF*! That’s the sound of four more potential jobs disappearing into the ether. That’s the sound of the hope disappearing for four, (or more), teachers who have lost their jobs due to these insane education job cuts, who thought these four potential jobs might be their salvation.

It turns out that this is not the first time Atascadero Unified School District has taken away jobs from teachers and staff at it’s schools this year.

* “The cuts come just two weeks after the board voted to lay off 18 certificated employees, including eight elementary school teachers, four special education teachers and a high school Spanish teacher.”

Certificated employees, for those of you not familiar with the term, generally means teacher’s aids, speech teachers, and sometimes the people who help with things like Reading Recovery programs. It means the workers who were paid hourly, instead of the workers who were being paid salary.

So, this means that 18 teacher’s aids are no longer in the classrooms to help the students of Atascadero Unified School District. Eight elementary teachers no longer have a job, which means that at least eight other elementary school classrooms have become that much more overcrowded, to accommodate the students who needed those eight teachers.

And, again, things are pretty sick when the school board thinks that it is perfectly ok to take away the jobs of the people who want to work in the Special Education departments. Those kids need the most help! It takes an exceptionally patient and understanding person to work with Special Ed students, and this area of teaching has a notoriously high burn out rate. Pretty stupid idea to take jobs away from the Special Education Department.

I hope that the fact that they also took the job away from a High School Spanish Teacher doesn’t mean that the students in that particular high school can no longer take a class to learn Spanish.

It seems that Atascadero Unified School District has also forced administrators and management staff to take unpaid furlough days this school year. No clue if that will continue into the next school year. What will happen is that the District Office will close for a total of 10 days during the next school year, to “reduce staffing hours”.

This is no way to run a school district. Sadly, it is the students who are going to suffer due to the lack of teachers, lack of help for special needs students, and from lack of curriculum.

Will this ever end?

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12
May 10

Don’t become a teacher

Just when you thought that it was over, another wave of teacher lay offs rises up, and sweeps away even more jobs in education. Is this ever going to end?

I started this blog when I lost my job as a teacher’s aide last September. It was a brand new school year, and the school district I worked for had just finished a wave of firing teachers, teacher’s aids, and staff over the summer and in the previous school year.

Now, another California school district has decided to fire a bunch of it’s employees. This district isn’t too far away from the one I used to work in. There is an article in the San Luis Obispo Tribune called Lucia Mar to send out 74 lay off notices.

“Seventy-four Lucia Mar employees, including more than 50 teachers and about 10 counselors, will receive final layoff notices.”

It looks as though the motivation for this is due to the budget:
“The district faces a $5 million cut from its $52 million general fund budget in the 2010-11 year.”

Read the article for more details. There is the implication that at least some of these teachers may be hired back after the new school year starts, but this is not a guarantee. The employees who received these lay off notices will be able to finish out the current school year. Right now, it is May. So, at best, these people will have a job until the middle of June, when even the longest school years end.

This means that these teachers are going to be left in limbo from right now, until perhaps the beginning or middle of August, wondering if they will have their jobs back. How are they going to get through the next three months with no income?

California isn’t the only State that has decided to start eliminating jobs in education. The Northwest Herald, in Illinois, has an article called D-26 teacher sues over layoff.

Illinois numbers all it’s school districts, instead of naming them after the county or area they are located in. So, “D-26″ means that this article is talking about School District 26, which is in Cary, Illinois.

Read the article for full details. In short, one of the 75 teachers who were recently laid off by this school district is suing the district, because she believes that she was unfairly laid off.

This teacher “alleges that she should not have been cut as part of the recent layoffs, which included about 75 teachers. The layoffs were made as part of an overall effort to reduce the budget by about $5.4 million.”

Once again, we have a school district who has decided to take away the jobs of nearly 100 people, because it wants to save some money.

The article goes on to say that at least some of the background of this story has to do with credentials. It seems that this teacher was working in the Special Education department (like I was). She was working towards earning the credentials one needs to have a job as a teacher of Special Education. It seems that D-26 fired her shortly before she would have completed those credentials.

Now, I know from experience working in several school districts that what often happens is that a school will find itself suddenly without a Special Education teacher. This is an area of teaching that tends to have a high burn out rate.

I have seen instances where the school district scrambles to put someone, any teacher they can find, into the Special Ed position. Now, in most places, there are laws requiring the Special Ed teacher to have a specific amount of credentials.

So, what happens when a Special Education teacher leaves before the school year ends? The district finds a teacher who doesn’t have the Special Education credentials, and puts them in that open position “for now”. The district might imply or outright state that the teacher needs to have the right credentials to keep this Special Education job. Often, the district keeps right on interviewing for a new Special Education teacher, regardless of if the teacher that they quickly threw in is working on those credentials or not. The teacher thinks he or she has found a permanent job. The district thinks they have a temporary hire, who they can easily replace when they find someone “better”.

Now, I don’t know the teacher in this article. I’ve never worked in that particular school district. (I may have observed some classrooms in that district as part of my pre-student teaching coursework, but that was years and years ago). So, I cannot know exactly what the particular circumstances are in this case. To me, it sounds like there are details that have yet to be revealed.

What I do know is that the comments that people are leaving after reading this article are sarcastic at best, and vitriolic at worst. The overall feeling I get from reading the comments is that the people who live in the area that school district is located in are fed up.

They feel like teachers, in general, feel entitled to having a job. They are angry about how the decline of the schools affects their ability to sell their house for the amount of money they want to sell it for. In short, they seem to feel that the teachers are the reason why the economy is bad. Which means that the next time that school district tries to increase it’s budget by adding a referendum that raises the taxes of the people in the area, it will be voted against. Which means that there will be more teacher firings.

Don’t become a teacher. It’s a dying industry.

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15
Apr 10

Logical next step?

The state of California has gone through great lengths in the past few years to fire as many teachers, teacher’s aids, and other school staff as it possibly could. It can be argued that the state of California has already gone way too far in this effort. The result is there are lots and lots of schools hopelessly understaffed. We’ve seen art programs, music programs, and even sports programs cut away. We were horrified when schools lost their Reading Recovery specialists, Speech teachers, and Special Education teacher’s aids. Thousands of students are not getting their needs met, and it doesn’t look like the schools will improve anytime soon. By the time they do, it will be too late for the students who are there now. It’s already too late!

Sadly, The State of California is not unique in it’s efforts to destroy it’s own educational systems. This same thing has been happening in many other States, all across America.

What do you do when you have fired all the teachers, and you don’t want to allocate any State funds towards hiring them back?

If you are McHenry County, in Illinois, the answer seems to be simple. Start a virtual school. A good friend of mine pointed out this article to me. It’s from the Northwest Herald, and the title is Online school could open this month in McHenry County. Read the article for full details.

There is a school in District 300, the district this article is talking about, called Cambridge Lakes Academy. If I am understanding things correctly, there is an effort being made to create a charter school called “The Cambridge Virtual Charter Academy” that somehow is connected to Cambridge Lakes Academy.

If this all goes as planned, students from Kindergarten through High School are going to have the option of taking online courses. There will be a variety of subjects to choose from, including Spanish, Language Arts, many kinds of Mathematics, and Earth Science, with the possibility of more classes appearing in the future. Parents of Kindergarten students would be encouraged to sit with them while they take their online classes. There would be textbooks that go along with the online classes, and hand written homework can be scanned into a computer, and sent to the teacher who will check it over and grade it.

One the one hand, I can see good things about this new version of school. Gifted kids could get their education from an independent study kind of learning, and avoid being frustrated by waiting for their classmates to catch up to them. Gifted kids could take accelerated classes not offered in their “regular” school. Students that are being Home Schooled would have access to more educational subjects than their parents are qualified to teach to them.

The article points out that students who are unable to attend school because they are shut-in (possibly due to health problems), and students who are incarcerated could benefit from these online classes. Students who dropped out of high school, but now want to go back and get their high school diplomas would benefit from the flexible nature of these online classes.

On the other hand, I can see negative things coming from this. There are going to be a lot of parents who have to work all day, and who cannot afford to quit their jobs to stay home with a child who is taking online classes. This means there will be a whole group of students who could benefit from these classes who are unable to take them. Instead, they will be stuck in the traditional school building, limited by what the school can offer inside it’s walls.

Here is a scenario that worries me: The parents who can afford it, and the ones who value education and want their children to get the best education available pull their kids out of the traditional school, in favor of the online one. Parents whose children are especially troublesome are not going to want to pull them out of the traditional school and watch them all day. Those are the students who will be filling the classrooms. This will be a nightmare for both the students who can’t financially afford to escape, as well as the teachers who are stuck in that classroom, without the benefit of having a teacher’s aide to help them.

I worry that the trend will be that schools will take the lazy way out. The superintendents will say that they do offer classes like Art, Music, Foreign language, and accelerated courses, etc., when in reality, they only offer these things in the online courses. States will be able to avoid hiring actual teachers to be in the school building so they can teach these classes. What has been lost will never be replaced.

I’ve already decided that I do not wish to have a job as a teacher ever again. Even so, when I read this article, I feel like I’ve been replaced by the machines.

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22
Mar 10

Silver Lining

This came from Postsecret
and I have absolutely no permission to post it here. But, I’m gonna do it anyway. (Well, unless someone from Postsecret contacts me, and complains, that is).

Postsecret is a collaborative project where people from all over the world create a postcard, and put their secret on it, and then send it through the mail to the guy who runs Postsecret. It started as a website, but has grown into several fabulous books. I own two of them. You can even go see this guy talk, and present secrets. Fascinating look into the human Psyche!

Anyhow… the other day I saw this secret:
dearboss

In case you cannot read the writing, here is what it says:
Dear Former Boss:
Thank you for laying me off last year. Now, instead of just looking through an office window at beautiful days outside, I’m out enjoying the weather!
Love,
Your Former Employee (which is then crossed off), escapee

I can relate to that! When I first lost my teaching job, I was devastated. Financially, it felt like the end of the world. Every little aspect of life suddenly became incredibly stressful.

Since then?
I’ve started doing some freelance writing, something I’ve always wanted to do, but never had the mental energy for after the work day was over. I’m going to need more of this kind of work so I can get off Unemployment Insurance, but, I have faith that this will happen.

I work from home. I make my own hours. If I would prefer to work from midnight to four AM, so be it! If I’m too sick to work that day, I can go take a nap and an antihistamine and get better. If I want to spend the day creating a costume so I can go see the Alice in Wonderland movie with friends of mine who also are in costume, I can. My work can be fit around my needs, instead of having my needs ignored, or once in a while having them fit around my work, (if I’m lucky).

I go outside more! For fun! Not because my job requires me to be outside for a certain amount of time, but because I actually want to go outside sometimes.

With the exception of when I had that sinus infection recently, I have been much healthier since I lost my job. I’m eating less. I’ve lost about five pounds since January. I sleep better. My allergies, in general, aren’t as bad as they were when I was working as a teacher. I can eat/drink food that has lemons in it again, something that I used to experience a mild allergic reaction to before I lost my job.

What I’m trying to say is, while I know first hand how stressful and terrifying it is to suddenly lose one’s job….. eventually, the “silver lining” from that storm cloud does appear.

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