Wednesday, July 26, 2006
First Interview Down
Well I had my first job interview yesterday and surprisingly I wasn't very nervous and it went well. I wasn't nervous because I was annoyed that my interview started later than the appointed time. I had to wait a half hour. The room that I was waiting in didn't have air conditioning and in the San Fernando Valley it was over a hundred. I wanted to just scream "if I had been late I'd have been written off." But I need the job more than I need to tell people off for making me wait in the heat. Of course it really wasn't their fault. I don't think they had been notified that I was there. And the department chair thought I was a student. I have to go back for a second interview in which they are going to watch me teach an hour long lesson that is supposed to be engaging. I'm a little scared. I think it's hard to be engaging with students you don't know. It's like the first day. I'm having a hard time deciding what to do. Help!
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Hey Norma, I've been missing you. I've had some good interviews and some very horrible ones, and still no job offers, not even a second interview. I had a similar experience, sitting in a hot office, but the interviewers knew I was there they were just to busy socializing with a teacher who happened to stop by to pay me any attention. I feel they had already decided on someone, because they sort of just went through the motions with me. I was a bit insulted by the whole thing. As you can see I'm still fuming. I had prepared to teach an hour long lesson. I started with a grammar exercise, I think it can be applied to teaching language, where I have various students call out a subject that I can build a sentence around. I have the student whose subject seems like a good starter, something fun or interesting, stand at the front of the class, and then I have a student call out a predicate. At that point I start adding adjectives, adverbs, puntuation, etc. with each student standing at the front of the class. I have my human sentence repeat their part of the sentence each time I add another word or punctuation mark. The kids just crack up. For my HS seniors I had them do the same thing but instead of the human sentence I had them call words out as I wrote on the board. They made the silliest sentences, but they were seeing the sentence structure and the different parts of the sentence as they participated in the activity. Then I went to vocabulary. I did a lot of out loud work. I did a KWL allowing students to work together in pairs to identify words they knew, or to ID words they definitely did not know. We would read and spell the words out loud. Then I would hand out a chart of the vocab words with the parts of speech, noun, verb, etc and a definition. Then I would let the students create sentences using the words in context, they could work together, and rehearse their sentences with each other, and they would volunteer to write the sentences on the board. These activities never failed to engage the students. I never got that far in the interview. While someone may have mistaken you for a student, I get the feeling people mistake me for someone who is too old to be starting out in this profession.
Anyway it was so good to hear from you again, and yes your grandfather is adorable, talk to you soon, Lisa
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