Your phone buzzes. Has the person who ghosted you resurfaced after months of silence, full of long-winded stories about having to rush off to Thailand to bail their friend out of jail? No, it’s just another email notification that another teaching opening has been posted on educationposts.ie.
If you go into teaching, you’ll come to loathe this site like college students loathe daft.ie every new year when they need to find another dismal house share. “Sure, I’ll work in Lough Ballybeag … I’ll find out where it is later,” you’ll say to yourself, desperation making you rationalise the most bizarre life choices as August is nearly over and you still haven’t secured a position yet.
You’ll fire CVs over Ireland’s four beautiful fields. You’ll turn up at some schools for an interview and immediately regret it, hoping you get rejected. I’ve blinked and passed through some one-school towns without even realising it. In some places, one-horse town is an exaggeration. I’ve travelled back in time, landing in towns still in the throes of the 1980s recession. I find myself looking at some of the buildings and convent schools suspiciously, half-expecting to see a plume of laundry steam come out of the far window.
Teachers in the 19th century were peripatetic (as in, we travelled everywhere). On bicycles, they’d move from school to school, legitimate to hedge, primers in hand. I don’t think things have changed all that much. We just use cheap cars now. We up sticks in the pursuit of a new job almost every year until we become permanent and have to settle for whatever school and town accepts us.
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No other profession demands such a sacrifice as often. Maybe only one big move for the particularly career ambitious, and this results in a marked improvement in lifestyle and prospects.
For us, we just achieve baseline: we’re employed with our horizon extending beyond one mere year. We mightn’t like the school or the town all that much, but we have a job.
At least we didn’t have to go to England or Dubai, right?
I remember my most intense interview well. When I walked into the room, I noticed the flip chart on a tripod lodged in the corner. I just assumed that a classroom was being repurposed for the interview. After a preamble, the principal announced, “now, you’re going to teach for five minutes”.
I looked over my shoulder at the flip chart. For a moment, I actually expected the wall behind me to rise up like in Blind Date and for a class to be sitting there. I slowly got up and walked to the chart like a condemned man. I don’t know if the Tongues of Pentecost descended on my forehead then, but I came up with a passable introductory lesson on personal writing.
I went on the offensive and addressed the principal directly, as if she were a student.
“Sarah, when was the first time you were scared?” (bold using her first name, but my hands weren’t on the wheel any more by this point).
“The first time I was left home alone.”
“Can you remember what room you were in? Sounds you heard? Was it dark outside?” I pried, spinning out how to shape an atmosphere in your opening paragraph that suggests fear without using the word.
I didn’t get the job.
Months later, I was in my gap-filler job as a tour guide, leading a group of Spaniards into Dublin city centre, when my phone rang. The person who’d got the job had bailed on them at the 11th hour.
I started on Monday.
I had to find a place to live, move counties and prepare to teach Leaving Cert English for the first time.
In just three days.
Reader, now we go to the fake interview. I’ve sat in them. You’ll probably sit in one. It’s a bit like Ripley’s Believe It or Not, you’ll never know for sure. You’re killing yourself for a job that is already gone. The signs vary. Usually, getting asked impossible-to-answer questions is one. A palpable indifference from the principal is another. If you’re being interviewed by a panel, it’s probably fake. If you feel like a US senator in front of a House select committee, you’ll know that your time is being wasted while they trial out experimental questions on you.
Those situations can actually be a little antagonistic. They really go at you with their interrogative tone, their judgmental expressions and their pregnant silences.
If you get really good at spotting the early warning signs, you can save yourself some petrol. Advertisements with outrageously detailed application criteria are usually fake jobs. Principals are required to conduct interviews, even if they want to give the job to an insider, so they’ll cook up a ridiculously prohibitive application process in the hopes of whittling down the number of applicants into the single digits.
So, how to make a good impression at a real interview?
One deputy principal revealed that one of the reasons they picked me was because I was reading a book while waiting in the reception area. I actually remember the moment quite well. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. More than 1,000 pages of microscopic type, excluding his infamous footnotes.
It wasn’t a prop. I hate dead time and always fill it with reading, but from then on, I always made sure I had an interesting book with me before an interview, in case I got asked a question about it, which would give me a chance to show my level of knowledge beyond the bounds of the syllabus.
