Yikes! What a grueling interview process, and I can't say it was a good thing. I've applied for the New York City Teaching Fellows program. Yep, I'm one of those hippy-dippy do-gooders who thinks a career change into teaching might serve my community and make me feel like a giver instead of a loaf. So I wrote two essays, got an interview, and trekked down to Irving Place from 4:00 pm 'til 8:00 pm for a whacked-out series of cruel and typical punishment that is the NYC teaching world.
I arrive to a chaotic mess in the high school lobby. The desk guards are telling the interviewees to mill about until a Fellows person comes to tell use what to do. What a polished group! Most everyone was in suits or professional attire and many were rolling luggage or carrying what I believed to be there materials for the 5 minute teaching exercise. We're all sizing up the competition and everyone is quiet, no one is talking to anyone else. It's worse that one of those Survivor shows. Yuck!
Some tiny gal comes into the room and tells the group of about 100 to head to the 3rd floor via the elevator. STUPID ADVICE! There is only one elevator so the majority of the herd heads to the stairs. Halt! We stop suddenly, no explanation. A line of us is formed snaking down the stairwell. What is happening up on the 3rd floor? After a few minutes, I hear a voice from the 3rd floor hallway tell folks to have their IDs out for check-in. I pass the information down to lower floors. I make a joke about feeling like cattle. Another woman said she felt more like sheep. No one else said a word. Ugh!
I get to the front of the line where only one woman is checking in the hundreds of us! No wonder it was taking so long! Completely inefficient and rude to have us corralled in the stairwell. And she wasn't understaffed. There was a guy right next to her who's only purpose it appeared was to look at a list after the gal signing us in repeated our name to him, as if he were retarded and couldn't hear our voice saying it. There were also around 20 interviewers and testing monitors milling about assigned rooms waiting for us to arrive. Why not assemble us in the auditorium and have a big board telling us our room assignments? Then the room proctors could check us in efficiently and with more personal grace and respect? So now I'm already grumbly going into my assigned classroom.
Now some slight gal comes into room 516 and tells us there is plenty of room in 514 and moves us. We take our little paper and move to room 514. First we take a very simple math test - DAG NABBIT, I studied via the SAT prep stuff and this crap was simple fractions, percents, and word problems. I felt under-challenged and worried about the screening process for math and science teachers. Next was a sample essay from a student we needed to correct. YIKES, that half-page paragraph was littered with so many mistakes I started running out of room to make corrections. The gal came in early to collect our work. About a quarter of folks passed their assignments forward before a woman in the class mentioned we still had 5 minutes according to the clock. The instructor passed the essays back to folks but the damage was done.
Off we went to the main events - teaching examples, group discussion, memo writing, and a personal interview. I came into the class and noticed name tags on the desks but couldn't find mine. One guy in the front said the tags were for the high schoolers but this made no sense to me since the names matched the group list assigned the room - our names were also written on the board. I couldn't find my tag so I sat in a chair with no name tag. Turned out the idiot in the front and put his materials on his desk right on top of my name tag. We had two interviewers and one made some joke about 'not passing the first test'.
The first interviewer took a minute to tell us she was a teacher for 10 years, tried admin but went back to teaching. The other interviewer was there to talk about himself and his philosophy on high needs kids. This went on for a good five to ten minutes. It started innocently enough with some jovial comments about teenagers acting there age, his grants to start schools for the most serious at risk for dropping out and not graduating, and his observations that it was the adults not acting their age. He ended with, "Enough about me and my teaching philosophy." When people end with nuggets like that, you know they went on too long about themselves. Little did I know his last theme in his diatribe, about adults not acting their age, would come back to bite me.
I was the last to present my teaching plan. I was not prepared to present to such a large group. The pre-interview instructions said candidates would present to three judges and thus I printed out four copies and had a hand-drawn large sheet for a visual aide. My topic was on albedo. Up to this point we had two lectures on fraction, one on Spanish, one on essay writting, one on narrative voices, and one on syllables. During the Skittles fraction lecture, my blue pen exploded oozing ink all over my hands and onto a few of the Skittles. Guess I've created my own little personal desk-scale experiment on color and chemistry, .
Most everyone was teaching elementary level material and here I was presenting middle-school science. I now had a white board which I didn't know would be available to me. I tried drawing my material on the board and it turned into a squiggly mess. So now I realize I'm the crazy science gal standing in front of a black and blue squiggly mess on the board behind me. I tried to engage the class and the interviewer, the one who didn't like adults. He turned on me. I figured it was test to see how I'd respond. I deflected his incorrect response to something we could test in the lab the next day. Lost time. Felt flustered. Was not my finest moment. I sort-of did think the squiggle mess looked nice as modern art.
More group and individual stuff. The interviewers never answered my questions about intent and objectives behind the exercises. The guy would simply read the material we already had in front of us, as if we were 2nd graders and needed oration. During a timed writing exercise, there was no clock or verbal notice give as to the time left. When the interviewer guy came back into the room, I asked how much time was left. His flippant reply was, "58 seconds." Like that is frickin' helpful.
And then I had epiphany. He doesn't like adults! He's wore a tie but the color combo is pastels and corals like a kid. He looks like a kid with his hairless face and gelled hair. He sees us as annoying adults to manage through this process. I just really wanted to scream, "Lighten UP!" Nothing he did made us feel welcome. Nothing he said helped calm any of us through a very long and stressful event. Worse, he made the environment seem hostile and judgmental, as if to express, "How dare you all come in here and even think you might be able to teach these kids. You know nothing." Where does this attitude come from? I'm not at some try-out for an über-competitive school like in some bad made-for-tv movie!
So I trudge home deflated and very discouraged. I look in the bathroom and notice a big blue spot of ink on my right cheek. WTF? Ah! It was from the blue pen explosion BEFORE my teaching sample, BEFORE the group discussion, BEFORE my one-on-one interview. I went through three hours of interactive interview crap with a dime sized blue ink blob prominently displayed on my face and NO ONE SAID ANYTHING. It's not like they could mistake it for a freak birthmark. It was bright blue and even had a smudge on one edge. Did folks think I'd be embarrassed if they mentioned it? Was no one listening to my lecture as they sat thinking silently, "What the hell is that blue blob on her face? Is it contagious? Is it a fashion statement?" Ah, well. Another day in why-the-heck-did-I-do-that-ville. I think I'm take a long nap and hope amnesia sets in.
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