What do you do with your life when you are trained to be a teacher, but no one wants to hire you? I was fortunate in undergraduate college to link up with Dr. Dennis Littky. He was and still is an energetic innovator in education. Rather than go through the normal series of methods courses that teachers in training went through I spent a full year prior to my student teaching working in schools 4-1/2 days a week. I got a chance to be an innovator myself in helping the Middle school that I was working in build a new reading program, based on literature from books not excerpts from Basal readers. Knowing Dennis had another benefit. The year I graduated from Stony Brook with my teaching degree he became principal of the newly built Shoreham-Wading River Middle School. I had the potential of getting a job.

Dennis was starting this school from its beginning and didn’t hire me right away, since he wanted more experienced teachers on his staff. Eventually I was hired mid-year as an administrative assistant. That lasted a month before I got a permanent substitute position in another district (Three Village). At the end of that year, I was offered two jobs, one in Three Village and one in SWR. I took the SWR position and never looked back.

So what did I do in the interim in order to make money to live on? Continue reading College grad…