“Becky? Kayla?” I asked, as I walked past their desks. “Can I talk to you for just a minute after class? You’re not in trouble, and I can write you a pass in case you get to fourth period late.”
“Sure,” Kayla replied.
“Okay,” Becky added.
The bell rang about five minutes later, and as the students filed out, I gestured for Becky and Kayla to come talk to me. After everyone left, I said, “I didn’t pass back your homework today for a reason. I’m putting together a portfolio of student work, so that when I apply for jobs next year, I can show what my students can do to the people who would decide whether or not to hire me. I’m going to copy your papers with your names covered up, and then give them back tomorrow, if that’s okay with you.”
“Sure,” Becky said.
“Yeah, that’s fine,” Kayla said. “Why are you applying for a new job? Are you leaving Nueces High?”
“I’d love to stay here if I can,” I explained. “But I’m just here for this year, as part of my student teaching class at Jeromeville. I’m going to apply for a job here, but Mrs. Tracy said that she doesn’t think any of the other math teachers are leaving, so they might not need a new math teacher here.”
“Oh,” Becky said.
“I hope you stay here!” Kayla exclaimed. “You’re a good teacher.”
“Thank you so much! Let me write you two passes, so you have time to get to class.” I grabbed two pieces of scratch paper and wrote and signed notes for each student excusing them if they arrived to class tardy. Then I headed two doors down the hall to Mr. Bowles’ classroom and his Honors Algebra II class I was assigned to observe and assist in.
The last day of class for winter quarter at the University of Jeromeville was approaching, and I had a big project due for the seminar class with Dr. Van Zandt and the other math student teachers. For this project, we had to put together a portfolio to bring to the job fair in April. Representatives from school districts all over the state would be coming to Jeromeville on three consecutive afternoons next month, where they would be conducting preliminary interviews for open teaching positions. Our portfolios were to include our résumés, letters of recommendation, undergraduate transcripts, score reports from the basic skills test that all teachers in the state needed to take, and samples of student work. Becky and Kayla had approved of my use of samples of their work, as had the only two students from Basic Math B first period who still had an A in the class. I was a little nervous asking them, I did not want any of them to think I was being weird wanting to copy their work. But, fortunately, all of them approved.
I chose Becky because she had been making a great effort lately to improve her grade, and it had paid off. She had a D+ on her second quarter report card, and currently, late in the third quarter, she was getting a B. I was not sure of what had caused the sudden improvement in Becky’s work, if her parents saw her grade and were pushing her harder, or if she took the initiative herself to bring her grade up. It was possible that she was just naturally having an easier time with the material, although this did not entirely explain her success. The College Ready Mathematics curriculum used at Nueces High used a technique called spiraling. Material from previous lessons and chapters continued to appear in homework assignments, as well as quizzes and tests, for the rest of the year. Becky got an A on the previous unit test, even successfully answering problems from the two units before that one, so she was doing something differently compared to earlier in the year. Kayla, a consistent B student, I had chosen for my portfolio for a different reason: she had unusually clear and legible handwriting that would look good when showing her work to others.
I had already written my résumé. I did not like it, I never felt comfortable doing things that felt like selling myself, but writing a résumé was sadly necessary in this world of job hunting. I had been told repeatedly that a résumé is just a foot in the door, to make oneself stand out enough to get a job interview. I was not sure if I stood out, but I tried to include as many things as I could to portray myself in a positive light. I mentioned my research internship in Oregon from a couple years back. I mentioned that I had worked as a math tutor with the Learning Skills Center on campus. I also had a section on my résumé where I listed various computer-related experiences. I said that I had experience coding in C++. I had taken an entire class two years ago on C++, and with technology in education being one of the big fads of that day, this may catch the eye of some human resources employee somewhere. I also wrote that I had experience coding web pages in HTML, even though my experience was very minimal, just enough to make a silly personal website, and to post the Dog Crap and Vince stories with pictures. That may come in handy for designing a simple, straightforward school web site eventually.
I also had dreaded for a long time asking for letters of recommendation. Dr. Van Zandt told us that he would be writing letters for all of us in the program, but most job applications require at least three letters of recommendation, and having even more than this might prove useful in case one of the letter writers were to say something honest but unflattering. I had had so many bad days as a student teacher that I was afraid to know what Mrs. Tracy and Ms. Matthews would say about me in their letters of recommendation, but I asked them for letters anyway since they were most familiar with my teaching. Mrs. Tracy had finished hers first, and as I read over what she wrote for the first time, I felt a wave of relief to see that it was positive. Mrs. Tracy’s letter began with the typical introduction, explaining that I was a student at the University of Jeromeville School of Education assigned to her geometry class as a student teacher. She continued with more specifics:
As a high school teacher with twenty-five years of experience, I have observed numerous positive teaching traits with Mr. Dennison. First, he has an excellent command of the subject matter, and is knowledgeable and confident in mathematics. This has allowed us to work on teaching and classroom management skills. Second, he is always prepared for class with lessons, examples, and testing materials. He patiently works with students, correcting them gently in a positive way while building understanding of the problem. Also, Mr. Dennison accepts criticism well and welcomes suggestions on improving his teaching. He sees this as a challenge to help himself become a better teacher, which is a rare quality in a student teacher beginning his career!
Mr. Dennison is showing noticeable improvement in the areas of timing lessons and classroom discipline. He is learning to create a disruption-free environment and maintain control of the classroom. With experience, he will continue to get better in this, as we all do.
My experience working with Mr. Dennison has been positive. I believe that he will be a positive asset to any school faculty.
A few days later, I got a similar letter from Ms. Matthews, the master teacher for Basic Math B. It was shorter, but mostly made the same points about my command of the subject matter and preparation, as well as still improving on things like discipline. Thankfully, she left out the part about the time I left the students unattended for a couple minutes. I felt that this letter put me in a positive enough light to include in my portfolio.
Just in case I needed a fourth letter, I had sent an email a few weeks ago to Dr. George Samuels, the math professor who two years ago had first encouraged me to go into teaching. Dr. Samuels was the co-author of a high school textbook series that was widely used around the state, and when he first asked if I had ever considered teaching, he mentioned that the field of education needed more strong mathematical minds teaching students. Having a letter of recommendation from a familiar name in the world of math education might help make my application stand out.
Before I left Nueces High that day, I made copies of Becky and Kayla’s work, as well as the two assignments from students in Basic Math B. I covered up their names as I ran everything through the copy machine. I wished that I had one of Becky’s assignments from a few months ago, so that I could have shown in my portfolio how much she was improving, but I had no reason to think to save one of her papers back then.
I checked my email when I got back to the house, and Dr. Samuels had written to me to say that his letter of recommendation was done, and that I could stop by his office this afternoon to pick it up. As I walked down the hall toward his office, I passed the office of Dr. Thomas, my other favorite professor, and wondered if I should have asked her for a recommendation as well. I had not asked, since I already had four people lined up, and of my two favorite professors, Dr. Samuels worked more closely with secondary education than Dr. Thomas, so his recommendation might carry more weight. But if any of the letters I had were too unflattering to include in the portfolio, I could then ask Dr. Thomas for one. The portfolio assignment was due in a couple days, but the job fair was still a few weeks away, and there was no requirement that the portfolio include the exact same letters of recommendation that I would give to the people who were hiring.
Dr. Van Zandt’s portfolio assignment was not just an academic exercise. The UJ School of Education allowed students to keep placement files, with all of our résumés, transcripts, and letters of recommendation in one convenient place, to send out with job applications. I would be able to reactivate this placement file at any time in the future that I was applying for a job in teaching.
For the upcoming job fair, I would submit all of the necessary paperwork to the School of Education Placement Office. I had a list of all the school districts who would send people here to UJ to conduct interviews. Some districts listed exactly what subjects and grades they had open positions for, but many used the hiring pool method, where they kept job applications on file regardless of what positions were open, and they contacted applicants as needed. Most of the school districts coming to Jeromeville for the job fair were from the northern half of the state, with a few from farther away. I had to turn in a list by the end of the week saying which school districts I was applying to, and the Education Placement Office would come up with a schedule of when each district would interview me.
I had been reading through the list of school districts that would be attending, trying to decide where to apply. Casting a wide net, sending a lot of applications, would be a good idea, although each one required filling out paperwork, and some asked for a cover letter. I also had ruled out several places I did not want to work. For example, I had the impression that the Capital City School District included a lot of rough schools in run-down urban areas. Not really the kind of place I was interested in.
I did apply to most of the school districts in the suburbs of Capital City; suburban communities seemed more like what I was used to. Some of these communities had their own school district, some school districts included two or three distinct communities, and some cities and communities were split between multiple school districts. Control of public schools in this state was highly localized, and local school districts were completely independent of city councils and county boards of supervisors, which led to this patchwork of school districts of widely varying sizes.
The school district for Jeromeville was not attending the job fair, but I did apply to most of the school districts adjacent to Jeromeville: Woodville, Silvey, and of course Nueces. I also applied to Fairview, just south of Nueces. Tyler Air Force base was located between Fairview and Nueces, and it had its own school district, which also included a few surrounding neighborhoods and rural areas; I applied there too.
I applied to a few other places that were a little too far to commute: Silverado, across the hills west of Fairview. Riverview and Petersburg to the southwest, across the lower part of the Capital River. Positas, about another twenty miles south of Riverview over some low mountains. To the southeast, down the Valley, I applied in El Monte and Ralstonville.
When I turned in my list to the Education Placement Office, I was given applications to fill out for each school district. On these applications, my information typically needed to be filled out neatly within small spaces on the paper, and my handwriting was messy enough that filling out these applications by hand would probably not impress those who would be offering me a job. Fortunately, I found a typewriter in the office at Nueces High that was free for teachers to use, so I spent two entire prep periods that week carefully typing my information into all of these applications.
Later that week, during the student teaching seminar, Dr. Van Zandt announced that our letters of recommendation were ready. I waited nervously as he passed out the letters. He handed me my letter, and I read it, anxious at first, but unable to hide my smile as I read more. This was by far the most positive and glowing letter of recommendation that I had ever received for anything. After the opening paragraph, in which he explained the nature of the program I was in and his role as the supervisor of the program, he continued to write about my qualifications.
Mr. Dennison has had a variety of experiences student teaching at Nueces High School, including Geometry, Basic Math B, and Algebra II Honors. His experiences have allowed him to teach students with many different academic abilities and socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. As a student teacher in the UJ certification program, Mr. Dennison has studied strategies for teaching students whose home language is not English, and he has practiced these strategies in his student teaching.
Mr. Dennison is a strong mathematics student with a great deal of mathematical knowledge. He graduated with honors, with a 3.95 GPA, and received the UJ Department Citation for Outstanding Academic Achievement. Mr. Dennison is the strongest mathematics student I have ever had in ten years of supervising this program. He plans his teaching well, and has developed a variety of instructional strategies. He is skilled at using computers, including experience in the classroom with software such as Excel and The Geometer’s Sketchpad. He is willing to try different teaching approaches, and he understands the importance of being organized and prepared.
Mr. Dennison enjoys teaching and values the power of mathematics for students. I am pleased to recommend Gregory Dennison for a teaching position in mathematics.
Wow, I thought after reading Dr. Van Zandt’s letter. That was quite the positive recommendation. Maybe I had a better chance of getting a teaching job than I thought I would.
I was in the odd situation that I did not get a spring break that year, because UJ and Nueces High had different weeks off. During UJ’s week off, I still had to do my student teaching every day at Nueces High in the morning, but then I was free for the rest of the day. The following week, Nueces High was off, and Dr. Van Zandt canceled the student teaching seminar for some of the days, since we were all teaching at schools that had that week off. But two new classes for spring quarter started that week, so I had each of those classes twice during the week in the afternoon. Even with that schedule, though, those two weeks were less stressful than usual, since I had half the day free each week.
During that time, on the days when I had student teaching in the morning, I took some day trips after student teaching was done, to places I was not very familiar with but had applied for jobs. I wanted to get a feel for what the schools and neighborhoods were like. One day I covered Silverado, Fairview, and Tyler Air Force Base, or at least the adjacent neighborhoods since I could not get on base. Fairview was a bit rougher than I expected, but the area around Tyler Air Force Base seemed okay, and I would probably get a lot of supportive parents at a school with a lot of military families. Silverado seemed like a wealthy area. It was in a well-known wine growing region, the kind of place that attracted rich tourists on day trips for wine tasting. I was not sure that I would be able to afford to live in Silverado on a teacher’s salary.
On another day, I headed south to drive around Riverview, Petersburg, and Positas. I had only been to Riverview and Petersburg once each, and only to Positas a few times, and I had never seen any of those cities other than from the freeway. Riverview and Petersburg were rougher than I expected them to be, although each city, Riverview especially, also had newer neighborhoods that seemed nicer and better kept. Positas looked more like a normal suburb, but it was home to technology jobs, and a research laboratory run by the same public university system as UJ. I was not sure how this would affect the culture, if I would feel out of place teaching the children of technology big shots, or if that background might produce students who appreciated the importance of learning mathematics.
I had plenty of new music to keep me busy during those trips. I had recently bought two new albums on CD: R.E.M.’s Up, and the self-titled album from Sixpence None the Richer that had “Kiss Me” on it. That song was rapidly becoming a guilty pleasure of mine, and the rest of the album was good too. R.E.M.’s newer stuff was not terrible, but it was definitely different from the R.E.M. hits I had grown up with in my teens. Some songs were more electronic sounding than what I was used to from R.E.M. In addition to playing these albums multiple times in the car, I also listened to some of the mix CDs I had been making. None of those places I went was far from Jeromeville, but none of them was particularly close either, and with all the time I spent driving around in each city, getting a feel for the areas and seeing all the high schools and middle schools up close, those two trips had me away from home for several hours each time.
When the seminar class began again, the same day that Nueces High started school again after spring break, Dr. Van Zandt gave us all our schedules for the upcoming job fair. Each interview time slot was only fifteen minutes long, spread out among three afternoons as people’s schedules allowed. I took a deep breath as I read the schedule. This was starting to feel real. I cast a wide enough net that I had fourteen job interviews, now scheduled with an actual date and time just a little over a week away. It felt undeniable now that the next stage of my life was arriving in a hurry.
Readers: When did you realize that you were growing up, and a new stage of your life was coming? Tell me about a time like that in the comments.
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