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? I had already decided when I graduated college that I was not going to live at home. My parents lived in the Bronx, but I had developed a number of friendships while attending Stony Brook and decided to remain out on Long Island. I had applied to a number of school districts and received no responses. I even put my name on substitute lists, but only was called in once. My monetary resources were very limited.
I decided to apply to J. C. Penney’s department store for work. My brother-in-law was an employee of the company, so I thought I might have some pull in getting job. My hopes weren’t too high; I would be willing to take a position as salesperson on the floor or in management. I was sure as a college graduate that I was qualified. After a few weeks, my vast experience did land me a position at J. C. Penney’s Bayshore store as a…stock boy. And what a stock boy I was. For $96 a week, I got to haul boxes, shelve items, throw out broken merchandise and practice all the skills that I needed to become the storyteller that I am today. I used so many voices there so that I wouldn’t become bored that on one occasion a colleague called out my name, just to hear me respond, “What?”, to hear what I really sounded like.
This is not to say that I wasn’t an efficient worker. I did my job quite well and made the work that I did enjoyable by being creative.
To be continued.
