|
into the World Wide Web, I was admirably prepared to make full use of it, and I do to this day.
I decided I'd like to be a teacher, now that I'm in Texas. I find that my education qualifies me to teach English or math, subjects currently experiencing teacher shortages. The fact that I have a master's degree qualifies me for the top pay rate available, making this dream almost affordable. It would seem that nothing in my education, or my experience, was ever wasted. Well, maybe anthropology. The jury's still out on anthropology. I guess I could deface a bathroom wall with "Kiss my Pithecanthropus Erectus" or something.
I wrote the previous paragraph in 2002 as I, as many other dot com busters, embarked on an 18-month career in consulting that to an outsider must have seemed much like a period of unemployment. Actually, I was blessed: I had about nine months of consulting work in that 18, and I had paid off my credit cards. I applied for a teaching job in 2003 to discover that I had to come up with an additional $4,000 to certify. The day I found out about that, I got an offer for roughly half again what a teacher with a masters gets in Texas. Since there was no way I could raise the admission fee and still pay off my now-burgeoning credit cards, I took the job. I was 62
Looking back on it, though, that was a good thing. I like my job. As a teacher in the public schools I might have lasted a month or two, but I really don’t belong in that system. Any doubts I may have entertained in that area were dispelled when I learned that The Dallas public schools were recruiting teachers from Mexico, paying them a $4,000 bonus, a green card, and a path to citizenship to take these jobs which, evidently, no one wants. God knows I don’t.
The difference between my consulting time and the period of unemployment back in the early 70s is that this time I wasn’t afraid, even for a moment. I knew absolutely that I was going to
|
