Feeling defeated, and the need to keep trying
I'll preface by saying that if this is the wrong place for this, I'm sorry ahead of time. Additionally if I've tagged you and you disapprove, please let me know.
Copious Backstory
As I wrote in the monthly mental health, I've been struggling with finding a job. I've spent the last 15 years in ECE (Early Childhood Education) at a private school. I've worked over the last decade first to finish my Associates degree with help from my boss, and then my bachelor's with help from the state (@DefinitelyNotAFae you may have heard of the ECACE program). I earned my educator license too late last year to search for a teaching job in public schools, so I spent the last year building up networks and references for the hunt this year. That all went well.
Over the last 6 months I have interviewed (or attempted to interview, because it's difficult to take off work for all of this) at almost all of the schools in my county for the positions I'm certified for. I quickly got the feeling that finding a teaching job was much different this year than in previous years. I got turned down, every time.
I wrote last week about how I had finally landed a job - an ideal one, checking off so many boxes. It was local, a 25% pay bump over other districts, an age range I'm familiar with, and more. I went on vacation this week ecstatic and celebrating. @Chocobean you may remember I tagged you about this update.
Yesterday I spoke with the district HR executive. Due to budget cuts that came in Monday, my position was no longer available and the offer was rescinded. I feel robbed.
I'm really trying not to let this ruin the rest of my family vacation, but it's hard. I feel defeated and dejected. I spent family time putting in more applications, again, to try and soothe my mind. I hate it. It does help feeling like I'm doing something about it, but it feels more like any opportunity I get can be dashed away before my very eyes without me being able to do anything at all.
What I feel worst about is that the deadline for getting hired is fast approaching. What if I don't land a job? What if I'm still stuck working where I am? I love that place and my coworkers, but my heart is set on moving on to something different and new.
I try to tell myself I can't see myself as a failure - I did succeed. I was mugged. There's nothing I could have done differently.
I'm still empty handed though.
So to the point of discussion... What helps you persevere in the face of adversity and hardship?
For those who had helped encourage and comfort me, I have excellent news - in the nick of time, I've been offered a second grade teaching position that somehow checks all the same boxes as the previous position I lost. The universe truly does work in mysterious ways.
Thank you for all your support, especially @chocobean @kfwyre and @definitelynotafae
@beeef (I hope I got the right amount of e's) I wish you the same luck as I had!
🎉🎉🎉
Congratulations! This is fantastic news, and I'm so happy for you.
That is indeed most excellent 👌 starting in Sept? Phew!
Starting next week! My guess is someone left last minute and they needed to fill the position.
LALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU IT’S STILL SUMMER I’M IGNORING MY CALENDAR LALALA
Pssst how's the new job :D
Yeah this!
@chocobean @kfwyre to make sure they see too.
So far it's going well! There's SO MUCH that I need to learn and integrate, it feels really overwhelming. I'm fortunate that I have a great and collaborative team supporting me, and understanding admins who see that despite being thrown in at the last minute I'm giving it my all.
Struggles: I'm having difficulty implementing the curriculum with fidelity and confidence because I'm brand new to it and it moves FAST. The new age group brings challenges in finding ways to motivate students. Trying to teach routines and expectations when I'm learning those alongside students is difficult.
Successes: I've connected with my students through games and activities. They've learned most of the expectations I have of them, and we are on our way to having a firm grasp of basic routines. My support team is activating to provide observation opportunities for me to understand how they implement/teach the curriculum so I can align with their teaching methods.
Future: I've put together a Donors Choose for some critical furniture pieces my classroom needs - the room is 100 years old and in an underfunded district, so things are tight. I'm reading through materials to better understand what is expected of me during instruction.
Overall, it's been an incredible challenge. I keep telling myself I knew it would be hard, and that I just need to push through. This is a learning year, and each new year after will get better and easier for me.
The greatest fortune I have is that I have a small class (16 students) with few behavioral issues. Most of my students come ready and eager to learn.
So happy for you! Glad you have a good and reasonably sized classroom, and I hope you can get some of the upgrades you need!
Thanks for the update! Glad you're off to a good start and are in good spirits.
I hope your year is off to a good start as well!
Thanks! I’m not actually back yet, so I’m currently trying to cherish every remaining hour of summer break I have left.
It's weird how much school years vary across the country
(It's not that weird, I just forget about it)
After just a week in the classroom, I really feel like I'm working to earn that summer off...
Transitions are the hardest! Once I’m back in the daily routine of things I coast pretty well, but overcoming summer inertia is SO DIFFICULT. Those first few weeks back are a special type of challenging.
It’s one of those things we can never complain about to other people because we’ll get sarcastic “yeah it must be SO hard having TWO months off” comments, but going from sustained leisurely expanses of nothingness to the unrelenting grind of CONSTANT DEMANDS REGARDING LOTS OF CHILDREN FROM MINUTE TO MINUTE is not to be underestimated.
Hopefully you can get to a place where you’re coasting soon (although that’s even harder given that you’re in a new position). I have faith you’ll find your rhythm. Some years it takes longer than others though.
That's great to hear! Sounds like it'll be an incredible year for you and these youngsters. Them coming in and being eager to learn is probably half the battle won.
Probably a domino effect of job offers and acceptances.
Also as our RAs come back Sunday and move in starts the 11th...
I AM NOT READY. ಠ ل͟ ಠ
You've got this! Best of luck with the new year.
Mysterious ways indeed!! Quick start is good for the bank account
You're gonna be great! And it sounds like you'll learn something about a different culture too :) all around great opportunity
Incredibly happy for you!
Congratulations 👏🎉
I'm sorry to hear that man. I'm in the same boat. I'm finishing a Masters degree next month but I'm in my late 30s so it feels too late. And I got laid off in March. I see friends owning businesses and getting promoted to VP jobs and partner in their own firms and I'm just languishing. I got to a fairly high up role in my field and realized I just had no interest in the field at all. I don't know what I'm doing and I'm almost out of money. It sucks, a lot of times I'm walking around just wishing I'd get struck by lightning or something. I don't any advice but I wanted to chime in to say what you're experiencing, while it is unique to your situation, is something others go through. Just have to keep trying, I guess. My dad always says, "this too shall pass". Good luck.
If it means anything to you I've had a similar career arc. Made it to the "dream job", then realized the dream job sucks. I do still like the work I'm skilled at but need to figure out what job I'd enjoy. Sadly most of the job options for startup software engineers in SF these days are for AI bullshit.
I hope AI can prove to be a net positive. But it seems the first applications that humanity has found for it are doing more harm than good.
I have several friends in similar places to you - this is our midlife crisis. I wish you strength, endurance, and good fortune.
You're worth more than these thoughts! The hardest thing to do is to keep trying, but with it comes the most rewards.
You are right, of course. It's hard to get out of the mindset. It's a constant fight to keep negative thoughts at bay.
Friend, I completely sympathize with your plight. Having experienced my own extended periods of unemployment and terrible working conditions, I know well the difficulty of perseverence in the face of indifference. You have every reason to feel like you have failed, given what you have experienced, and yet your post is clear about your determination.
I think of a particular passage of the Bahá'í Writings:
I think that your efforts to keep your spirits up during a difficult time are very laudable. No doubt, when these difficulties have passed, the qualities that you have developed during this time will help you provide support and comfort to others during their hardships.
oh no I'm sorry to hear that
I remember celebrating with you, and I was very happy for you. There are a lot of ECE things I've read from your posts and I know you're a highly qualified and empathetic educator, and that your kids would do so, so well!! The system has failed these children, and I'm sorry you've been put into this position :'( I can certainly understand how you feel a little bit.....Many years ago I had almost a dream job: the boss was genuinely nice, the work was fun, the coworkers respectful (in their manner lol) and we all had a great time. We were doing American Steel construction 2004-2008.
I'm so done with America, to be honest. Dessert storm, 911, Afghanistan Iraq, dot com, 2008 subprime, then 2016 and 2024 *gestures wildly
I liked celebrating your successes with you, but I'm also down to feel down together with you this week as well. It sucks, that's so suck, it all sucks >:E
Back to your question:
Small help: being able to rant and have someone listen, and says "yeah! This is messed up!" And foam at the mouth a bit together without them saying "but to be fair ---" or try to problem solve me. I'd love to go kick rocks at the beach together, have a friendly axe throwing target practice, shoot some (recurve) bow, make weird angry feral noises and eat junk food together. If you want to send me PMs of generic rage dumb kaomoji or emojis, I'll send some back.
Bigger help: [this is for me only, not advice for you] focus on the big picture world instability and shrug off responsibility for things having gone wrong. I love feeling not responsible so this is therapeutic and east and naturally regenerative for me. If it doesn't come easy for you, the meta stress of not being able to de-stress is not worth it.
I think your general idea of refocusing for a bit on something - anything else - can be rejuvenating. Today I've spent most of the day in the car as a passenger, so I'm taking the time to read and, as you see here, do a bit of writing. It's helped.
Especially with reading, I feel I can lose myself in another world for a while, like a vacation for the mind.
Re the personal side
I sincerely hope to have better news soon, though my confidence is flagging. I do appreciate your support. I just have to keep trying.
I understand that you have a pressing need to change jobs, but perhaps it is okay for you to take some time to recover. Even if it's just a week or only a few days. You are not made of stone.
My problem is there is a deadline... Realistically the school year starts in two weeks. If I can't find anything then, that's when I'll have to call it.
Apologies I apparently don't get pinged inside a spoiler box.
I hope you can find something, is there a provision in the scholarship for "cannot find work" or do you need to look further afield?
I personally keep moving forward because I have to. I just... Like I am internally driven to take the next step. Sometimes I fall down and cry or mope but things need to be done, so I do them. Not all the things, not necessarily well either, but the caretaking I need to do gets done.
I also have something of an optimistic nihilistic point of view. At least sometimes. Nothing we do matters, so you can do everything and anything. (And at the same time everything we do matters so we should do good things, I am a contradiction in philosophy)
Pings don't work inside of any topic text. It's why stuff like the Book Club has them in a separate comment.
Also, they DO work inside of
detailsblocks if they're used in a comment. It's how I do it for the Backlog Burner for example.This is good to know! Thank you.
Wasn't sure the reason just wanted them to know I hadn't ignored the ping. Thanks!
Both your views mirror my own... I can't give up, I have others depending on me. One foot in front of the other. A lot of my drive and determination comes from not wanting to let those closest to me down.
I've also described myself as an optimistic nihilist. I feel we'd get along famously. I know I've read some of your struggles elsewhere here - I hope you're doing well and know that you're seen.
I'm doing alright, battling some sort of chronic fatigue but I don't know what's causing it. Caregiver burnout? Something medical? Psychological? The same thing that causes weird joint pain flares all over my body that we can't find the source for? Who has time to figure it out?!
Good luck in your search, definitely reach out to your school for advice on the scholarship rules, maybe there are options. And if you're ever in Central IL maybe we do a meetup
Sorry to hear about situation, that truly sucks. I do hope you find an opportunity in the near future, you've clearly got the determination to keep going and get something.
I do sympathize with your current situation. I went through something similar around college admissions when I was in high school that left me feeling like the world around me was crumbling. I tried telling myself I wasn't a failure because I still had a success in that I was going to go to college.
Something that did help me get through it back then was just knowing that I wasn't alone in my situation. I had a friend that year who also had similar college admissions results to me and we bonded over that fact during our first year of college. Another thing that helped me was just taking time to process things, let my mind marinate a bit in the thoughts. I had that whole summer to just think about my situation and slowly come around to accept it. Just give yourself a few days to work through things and let the edge of your emotions wear off. The final thing that really helped me get over it was just taking a stand and trying to understand what my next options were. Once you find your footing, you can better plan for what to do next and take action with a clear mind.
This really sucks. We’re all struggling with this on one level or another especially around this age. Ask me how I know.
Anyway. I would suggest looking into “ never search alone” which is a program to help people find work and/or enter a new industry. It’s well structured, involves getting matched with 4–6 people over about 12 weeks, supporting each other and figuring it out together (with a process). They have volunteers matching you with others. It’s free beyond the cost of the book (less than 20$). Thousands of people have gone through the program.
if you are willing to relocate to new mexico, most districts are really short on teachers. its s poor state and most of the perks are cultural but you can definitely live on a teacher's salary and its a blue state. Linking to a list of Albuquerque public schools open positions as of last Friday
I'm so sorry. That's awful news. I remember how excited I was to get my current position. If they had called me and rescinded it I would have been utterly devastated.
Big internet hug from me.
I have an interview tomorrow for a position which fills many of my boxes again. Wish me luck!
Trickiest bits with this position would be that I'd go from teaching prek to 2nd grade (big change in age, I'd need to learn a lot which is fine) and also it's in a heavily Hispanic district. I'll need to learn a lot about what is culturally appropriate there.
Congrats! Best of luck with the interview.
And I think you’re approaching the change in age and culture with the right attitude. Earnest curiosity and a desire to learn is nearly always a good path forward.
Good luck!
That sucks, friend. I totally get how you feel robbed of a job you were offered but never received. How the hell else would someone feel in that situation?
Not to detract from your story, just to sympathize as someone who has witnessed similar bullshit first-hand:
Backstory
My wife is/was in the ECE field too and yeah it's a major pain in the ass (hence the 'was'). She graduated from school wanting to be a kindergarten teacher for the rest of her life and well... that was 2019. School district kept bouncing her around in the most bullshit manner. Her first school had 3 kindergarten teachers, but they only had the budget for 2 when the new year hit, so her being the newest teacher got bumped to a different school far away from where we lived. Then like two months into the school year turns out there were too many kindergartners for just 2 teachers, so they needed a third one, but by then she was already (relatively) happy somewhere else.
Then guess what happened the following summer? The exact same thing. Both her new school and her old school lowered the number of kindergarten teachers they would need for the next school year. So she got booted again to a different school, and the teacher that replaced her in the previous school got the same. Again because they were the newest hires and it wouldn't be fair to keep them over someone that's been there longer. Well shit how the hell are they going to be there longer if they keep getting their positions taken away every god damn year?
Eventually she found a job teaching remote to a school in a different state, and really enjoyed that. But yet again, funding dried up and the entire virtual school closed down, laying off all their remote teachers in the process (those who were local were transferred to in-person schools, but those who were from out-of-state, like my wife, just had their contracts run out at the end of the year). By then she was jaded from the whole experience of dealing with school systems, we were expecting our first child, and decided to just open up our own in-home daycare so that she could spend time at home with our baby and not have to deal with the bs that school districts bring.
One thing that really helped us during all of this was to mentally fast-forward into a point in the future (like now) where all this is resolved and realize that we would never really think back to this stressful period in our lives (other than to remember how shit it was and how glad we are that it's over). Like right now she is in a much better situation career-wise, so she doesn't even think about her time as a teacher and how stressful that all was. It just doesn't really come up in our everyday lives unless we see some ridiculous news about our local school system doing something stupid and feeling glad that she's not in that mess anymore.
Prior to this we also dealt with some infertility issues, and that was probably the worst experience of our lives, mentally speaking. Just awful feeling all around. And I kept thinking to myself "someday this will all be in the past and we won't look back because why the hell would we" and sure enough here we are in the present and I don't look back at that specific point in our past because yeah, why the hell would I? It was stressful and awful and the only reason I think back on it from time to time is to feel better about my present situation now that we are no longer dealing with that particular obstacle.
So I hope your situation gets better soon! We human beings are always looking to better our lives in some way, so I'm sure you'll be at a happier point in your life sometime in the near future. And maybe thinking about that happier point, and how this current state of affairs will just be a blip in the path that you took to get there, might help you feel better today.
(Don't mean for that last paragraph to sound dismissive if it does. I was going more for hopeful or optimistic, but I can see how it could sound like I'm trivializing your issues, which is not my intention at all. I feel for you, OP. This was just a strategy that worked for me and my wife in the past, so I hope it can help you feel better too.)
Re your wife's experience
My main goal is twofold - I want to have time for my kids, and I want to have a secure pension. Working in the education sector is my ticket to achieving those things with a salary I can stomach.
That outlook is certainly helpful if I can get myself to take a step back and see it that way. It's how I've been able to get to where I am now! I worked hard raising a family, working, and doing schoolwork simultaneously in order to achieve what I have now. It wasn't easy and I always visualized where I would be afterwards... Which is part of why it's so jarring that I've gotten to this point and this has been a bigger struggle than everything that's come before!
Ah, man. I'm really sorry to hear that. Job searches can feel so defeating, but hang in there. My line is always open if you ever feel like yelling at Chinese kids.
I'm sorry about losing the offer, that's the worst. I don't have much direct experience with this, but when things seem bleak in general, I try to find something fulfilling to do that gets me out of my head. A good thing for me (by way of example only, not recommendation) was volunteering at my daughter's school. I felt like I was doing good work and I got connected to other parents.