To make you rethink becoming a teacher

What a fat pain in the ass. Everyone talks about how much trouble California has recruiting and retaining good teachers, well, here is one of the many reasons: It is a gigantic pain in the ass to teach legally in the state of California. Red tape and bureaucracy galore! Not to mention expensive. It's one of the only professions I know where you must continually shell out more and more money for "professional development," yet the pay you are making is barely enough to get by on to begin with. No wonder so many people quit within the first 5 years.

I've known this before, I had to deal with it for 4 years when I was teaching in California. You REALLY have to WANT to teach in order to be willing to put up with it all, and on top of that, the shit you have to go through to meet all the legal requirements to be in the classroom sucks your will to live even faster than the job itself. I suppose that could be see as a good thing - it helps to prevent half-committed people from trying to become a teacher of a whim, but for those of us that are really serious about it....what a pain in the ass, for lack of better words.

Example: Right now I am trying to register as a substitute for SF Unified; basically a job to tide me over til I move onto bigger and better things. SF Unified requires that I be a fully credentialed teacher to be a sub - fair enough, I hold a clear California credential. But that's not enough. I have to register with Ed-Join just to apply, which involves basically entering my entire resume into a website, plus other obscure information that I have to go on quests to find. Once I am on Ed-Join, I apply for the job through the website, whereupon I have to re-enter a lot of the EXACT SAME information again, because whoever created the application didn't bother to check to see what's already there. Ok, so my application is successfully submitted, after spending an hour online this morning.

Then I get an email with the list of all the OTHER things I need to provide:

1. Copy of your Edjoin application
2. Resume
3. Credential
4. CBEST scores
5. Official Transcripts
6. Negative TB test taken within the last 60 days
7. A driver's license or a passport
8. Social Security card
9. Money order made payable to SFUSD for fingerprinting ($44 if you have a California credential, $100 if you have an out-of-state credential. If you have an out-of-state credential, you will also need a $55 money order made payable to CCTC to apply for your California credential.)

OH MY GOD! To be a friggin' substitute teacher!!!!

Notice that it requires access to a printer, which means either trips to Kinkos or bothering someone I know to print it for me. Also notice that I have to PAY to prove I am not a criminal and I don't have TB. And notice the duplication of info - now they need a resume which has all the same info that I provided online.

And the transcripts on top of that -- I just spent $26 to get copies of transcripts from 3 different universities, which I will have to wait a week to receive. And the only woman who processes sub jobs at the district is going on vacation, meaning I have to wait another week til she gets back to process the paperwork once my transcripts arrive.

The thing that kills me - I ALREADY HAVE A VALID CREDENTIAL!!!!!!!!!

It's signed by Arnold himself. I jumped through a zillion burning hoops over the past 4 years to get it, and simple possession of it is NOT ENOUGH to let me be a substitute teacher without jumping through a bunch more hoops and shelling out a bunch more cash.

Every single thing on that list was required for me to get the credential, and now I have to provide all of it again. And of course, having been out of the country, most of my life is boxed up, and the file of important "teaching" documents that I left in a very safe spot has vanished somehow in my parents' black hole of a house.

Students: Have sympathy on your teachers, you don't know half of the crap they have to put up with in order to be in that classroom.

Non-Teachers: When you give us flack for getting all that lovely vacation time, remember that we earn it.

It's enough to make me look for coffee shop jobs.....