I am actually liking the new job, despite how it reads in these posts. It's just that the good points are more or less the same as with all my previous experience, while the parts that I can complain about are all new.
I'm sort of in the worst of both worlds here. I'm just a fill-in, so I don't really belong to the K team. They know I'm going to be going back to the sub team in a month. Likewise, I can't really talk to the sub team about how our days go because my day is so different. It's the same pay, but a lot more responsibility (lesson plans, consistency, room maintenance, etc), and not much more respect.
I sent out an email to all the parents detailing what we've been doing this week. I talked about all our games and projects and centers, and I also mentioned how the kids have been dealing with the change of teachers. The Vice-Head and other employees who saw the email said it was a very well-written update; they were very impressed and pleased. I do have a little skill, of course, in stringing words together.
However... I misspelled the school's name in the subject line.
It was a typo, and I immediately followed it with another jokey email blaming the typo on "faulty keyboards." Slightly embarrassing, that.
No one mentioned the typo at all, though. A couple of parents sent appreciative replies. One parent sent a note saying "Congratulations! You survived your first week!" Yes, I did, and I also managed to stumble through your heavy condescension, as well.
I know it was probably meant well, but it grates just a bit. I admit to being anxious about taking over mid-term for a popular teacher, but honestly --- making it through, and admirably, was pretty much presumed on my part. Again, this is my career, and this is not my first year. Seriously, do only teachers get that kind of treatment? Do lawyers' friends send them breathless notes of congratulation when they write their first memo?
Well, maybe they do. I do chafe at being treated like a young tyro, perhaps because I look like one (as I'm told ad nauseam, I appear to be twenty), at the age of thirty-seven.
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1 comment:
Definitely, stick with the negatives. Far more entertaining to hear about the downfalls and pitfalls of life at Pristigus.
"Congratulations, you survived your first week" is just standard-issue friendliness, though. I'd send something like that to an acquaintance after their first week at a new job, whether they were a teacher, a surgeon, a janitor, or whatever. New gigs are stressful.
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