Back to work

First of all, I could not sleep all night. That really has to be one of the biggest pet peeves of all time, because you can't force yourself to sleep! Man, it sucked. Anyway.

Getting to the address in Flushing took an hour, which isn't bad, but it felt like forever. I hate the Q25 bus. The address was the Region 3 Operations Center, and I sat in a room and signed the sheet. I figured I'd be sitting there all day long, because hello, bureaucracy much? But my name was called about an hour or so later. I was assigned to PS130 in Bayside.

It took awhile to get there, two buses. Coughed and struggled not to openly gag when standing on a street corner near a bunch of smashed fish. Blech. I arrived at the school around 11.30. Of course, no one knew who I was or what I was doing. I felt overdressed in my nice new professional suit, but that's okay. I felt like a grown up, and now I know that I can tone it down a bit. I helped a couple teachers with preparing math materials.

It was a pretty quick day. I expected to feel overwhelmed, but mostly I was just confused and a little disappointed. See, I'll be at this school, doing who knows what, for who knows how long, until someone from some office calls me with a classroom assignment of my own. And this school is apparently a really good magnet primary school. I was all taken aback and confused at that, after all of the talk about working in high-needs classrooms. The staff seemed pretty nice, and fairly welcoming, even though most of them assumed I was a student teacher. Oh well.

Um, let's see. After school (which gets out at 2.50!), I took the F train all the way through Queens and Manhattan and then into Brooklyn, for another citywide placement fair. It was my first, but just as frustrating as I'd feared. No schools from Region 3. Thankfully, the bigwigs knew that we were having problems finding opportunities, let alone jobs, so we were cleared to look in other regions, as long as it was in the same borough. I talked to two people, both in Brooklyn, and they were nice and marginally interested, but nothing solid. And I don't think I'd be cool with signing up to teach somewhere on the spot. Although, after today, maybe I would. So while I am glad for the experience, it was fruitless. However, I did very much enjoy catching up with some of my classmates who were also there.

Okay, I am tired now and The Amazing Race is on. Later.