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‘So you are all likely to be made redundant at the end of July.’ The plump pink shirted man announced to the group.
This was day one of my new ‘job’.
The previous week I’d been through a forty-five minute interview. Interviews are becoming more difficult. Not only were there questions to answer but I also had to teach the two people interviewing me.
‘Just a five minute lesson,’ I was reassuringly told on the phone. ‘I’ll send you the details.’
The details demanded a ten minute lesson.
Hours of work went into preparing that ten minute lesson. When I pressed ‘print’ the printer somehow sensing the importance and urgency of the request suddenly chose that exact moment to run out of ink.
Hours of work went into preparing a revised ten minute lesson, which this time would involve taking my lap top into the interview too.
I am hopeless in an interview situation.
I can actually feel the metal shutters slowly coming down in my mind as I sit opening and closing my mouth like a gormless goldfish while I struggle to think of an answer to their last question,
‘What made you decide to go into teaching?’
Can I tell them about my careers guidance interview when in a poky office I was told, ‘You’re pretty and will be married in couple of years’ time. It will be a waste of money you going to university. Teaching is your best option. Here’s the form. Can you see who’s next?’
Instead I can hear my muffled voice coming from somewhere within. There are distorted sentences being voiced, I clutch at one and reiterate it changing just one word.
‘I love being with people and helping them.’ I say.
It sounds insincere.
The interviewers have a tick sheet.
Sometimes I hit the right word and an interviewer’s pencil checks the sheet and I am rewarded with a nod and a smile. The word ‘assessment,’ was greeted in such a way. More typical is the critical frown and the stubborn refusal of the hovering pencil to move.
I begin my ten minute lesson.
I’m teaching vocabulary: the names of colours. I’ve brought in my paint brushes and little watercolour squares of paint. Within moments they are painting cerulean blue, alizarin crimson, viridian green, burnt umber and yellow ochre. The names of the colours are beautiful and we search the picture on my lap top for traces of each shade.
With the lesson over more frustrating questions follow which I struggle to answer.
I leave eager to feel once again the wind in my hair.
I smile wanly at the next person to be interviewed.
‘Good luck,’ I say.
Later, I was amazed to be offered the job.
‘Now don’t take this the wrong way,’ the voice said on the other end of the phone.
Immediately I’m taking it the wrong way.
‘What we liked about you… is that you are so… ’
There’s a pause and I wait. I’m winging in words of my own. ‘Creative, inventive, enthusiastic?’
‘ …gentle.’ The voice declares.
I am stunned.
It’s the very quality that cost me my last job: an inability to say ‘boo’ to a goose and to stand up to a bullying Head teacher.
‘We’d like to offer you two hours’ teaching a week.’
I am shocked. There had been a vagueness about the hours on offer, but I’d expected more than that.
I’d gone through all that effort and preparation just to secure two hours’ work a week!
Still somebody wants me, and my fragile self-esteem is rejoicing.
Now at the conference that I’ve been invited to attend I am being told that redundancies now loom.
I’ve been in the ‘job’ for half a day!
I smile wryly at the woman who’d been at the same interview and is now attending the same conference.
‘Never mind,’ she says. ‘Good luck!’
We are the only ones laughing softly and wearily in that stunned room.
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