I didn’t get that half time job at George Washington High School. I should say, I didn’t want it. It turns out that the department itself is great, a bunch of gifted young people firmly grounded in Krashen whose district scores are so high that the school has to leave them alone. It’s a long story, but I won’t be there next year.
I’ve decided to go for a school that wants me. Where I don’t have to go into an interview and say, “Can I please have a job? I need a job, please. Will you let me in, please?” My feeling is that if a job interview is set up in that way, where you have to convince people that you have value by saying the right thing, it’s just pathetic.
All I got from the people in the GWHS interview was, “Are you good enough?” Of course, that brings up the question, “What does that mean? Good enough for whom? For you and what you think good foreign language instruction is? How would you know?”
In the case of this particular interview at this high school, in a true ironic twist (as the chair of the department sat there pulling his hair out but not being able to say anything), I got grilled by a former French teacher from Georgia about methods, data collection, and classroom management. Suddenly, if I were to get this job, I realized that I had to show how I aligned with her vision, and not necessarily with my own vision of what is best for kids.
The person, now an AP, had taught French in the old way and had actually written a large part of the current Georgia standards ((I was told over 50%). The irony is that I had bashed those very standards (back in my bashing days) as kind of insane in terms of Krashen in a long series of blog posts here about two years ago – they seemed so off base in terms of the emerging research that I felt compelled to process my thoughts about them here, where I process a lot of stuff.
Those blog posts are categorized here as Georgia Foreign Language Standards. The karma is weird, right? I bash this person’s work on my blog and two years later am face to face with her trying to convince her to let me into her school.
Her job, of course, was to let me know who the boss was. No longer just a French teacher, now she had some power and was going to make sure that the department chair and I sitting around that table, both known in this district as firmly in line with Krashen and the overall district vision, didn’t get by without a bit of groveling.
It really was pathetic. Anyway, that’s the update on the job situation. I’m still looking for a half time position. I’ve had two interviews at a school much closer to home where none of the above nonsense happened and where the administration has already fully bought into the district vision. I’m waiting to hear on that. Here is the first link to the Georgia standards bashing posts (there are 20):
https://benslavic.com/blog/2009/03/07/im-glad-i-dont-teach-in-georgia-first-in-a-series/