How are none of us in this group?

So unemployment has hit a sixteen-year high of 7.2%. How in the hell are none of us among the unemployed? We are all smart, but I know that at least Katie, Chris, and I have all made comments along the lines of, "Well, I guess I'll be fired soon. Damn." Good work staying employed so far everyone. Let's hope the 2009 unemployment peak doesn't hit this blog too hard.

The blog has been assigned a task: find a job!

A warning before I begin: this post will be long-winded, biased, irrelevant to most of your lives, and, frankly, not particularly interesting.

Background:
I am currently a Mathematics Fellow in the NYC Teaching Fellows program. Fellows are required to, among other tasks, find their own full-time teaching position in their subject area. The job search is supposed to be completed over the summer, but those who do not find a full time position before the beginning of the school year are not tossed out of the program, but rather assigned to “help-out” (yes, that phrasing is used in actual Fellows documents) at a school until they are able to find a full-time job. At this point the clock begins ticking, and if a Fellow has not gotten a job by the fifth of December then he/she is no longer a certified teacher and is booted from the program.

I was one of the many who did not find a job over the summer. After moving math books around for three weeks at the school to which I was assigned, I was given a full-time health schedule to teach. Needless to say teaching health is not nearly as appealing to me as teaching math, and that is without even considering the personal costs imposed on me by the knowledge that every day I entered the classroom I was hypocritically preaching healthy decisions to small children.

Today I confirmed what I had long suspected—that my school’s budget has no room to hire me (and in fact must cut approximately $300,000 in already committed funds). My goals in writing this post: 1. Organize my own thoughts and opinions (feelings, I suppose, but I have a strong aversion to the connotations of that word); 2. Outline the limitations I face in moving forward; and 3. Seek suggestions concerning how to proceed.

My thoughts:
Here’s where I now stand: I am very happy that I will not be teaching health for a year, and I am fairly confident that I will not be disappointed when I leave my classroom for the last time. As it turns out I am capable of managing a boatload of rowdy children, but I don’t like it. My time at FIT spent tutoring relatively calm and level (though not normal) people made me forget that I would soon be facing middle-school students. I enjoy the feeling of passing information on to a child, knowing that the home environment will never be able to educate the child in the same way that I could, but that is such a tiny portion of the job that I am quite happy to be handed what I consider to be a form of a Get Out of Jail Free card.

To that end, I am no longer actively looking for a math position and assume that as of December fifth I will be free of all obligations to the Fellows, the Department of Education (DOE), and Brooklyn College (where I will no longer be enrolled as of 5:00pm on that date). For those of you about to argue that I am tossing myself into unemployment during one of the great modern downturns I ask, “What math teacher with a full-time position and any concept of the state of the economy would willingly vacate a position?” As proof I submit: 1. HR people at the Fellows and the DOE nearly laughed when I asked about openings; 2. My principal has heard of only two openings of any kind in the last few weeks; and, 3. The DOE has blocked access to the Open Market Hiring System, supposedly the last resort of a certified, unemployed teacher.

Where to go from here:
I do not know how to proceed from unemployed to happily employed. Happily employed in the sense that not only am I being paid, but I also do not want to die when I wake up and realize I have to go to work (this is how I feel about being a health teacher, which is not a healthy attitude. Har de har har.).

I do not even know in what fields to look for jobs, not because of relative unemployment rates in different industries, but rather because I am unsure of the direction in which I hope to progress in my career. I know that I like mathematics and economics, but I do not know how to turn that into some form of career path.

Any suggestions, input, and/or guidance would be appreciated, but please refrain from the standard chorus of, “Sorry you are losing your job”; remember that I am not upset about that (and that I have coworkers and classmates who will not stop offering false condolences along the lines of “That’s fucked up, man. Really fucked up.” Not helpful.). The people reading this blog know me better than just about any group in the world, so I am relying on all of you to be my career counselors, though I will likely stop by the NYU Office of Career Services sometime very soon.