Day 301 - Thanksgiving

image of Thanksgiving by rfduck, via Flickr.com

At church last night, Pastor Manny reminded us that we should not just give thanks for the things that are easy to be grateful for - good health, a job, a great family. We should be thankful for even the things we at first might complain about - missed opportunities, misfortunes, missing friends - because we learn more from them than from the easy things. And each of them offers another opportunity for us to choose to be positive, to live, instead of being negative and grumbling.

So today, once again, let me give thanks for one of my missed opportunities.

Back in 1980 I had just left Carbondale, Illinois, and knew that I wanted more than anything else to be a teacher of English as a Second Language somewhere - anywhere. But I ended up in Minnesota where the opportunities were few and the pay was absolutely lousy. I worked temporary jobs while I continued to look for ESL teaching positions. After five months of looking, I was excited when I got a call from a woman I had met at the International Institute of Minnesota who told me about a school in St. Paul where the principal was desperate to interview more candidates for a vacant position there. She put me in touch with the principal and I scheduled an interview for a Friday afternoon, the last day I would be working for American Guidance Service in Circle Pines, Minnesota. My colleagues at AGS took me out for lunch that day and then I headed off to the high school in St. Paul for my 3 p.m. interview.

First I met with the principal who explained that they were very short staffed and they needed to fill the vacancy as soon as possible. He had lined up a number of others on the staff for me to meet including the head of the English Department and one of the teachers in the school's ESL program. I don't recall much of what the head of the department had to say, but I thoroughly enjoyed speaking with the teacher. She explained that the school had a large number of Vietnamese and Cambodian students as a result of refugees from those countries being brought into the U.S. after the end of our involvement in Vietnam. I already knew that churches throughout Minnesota had sponsored refugees which resulted in small numbers of students in towns and villages well outside the Minneapolis and St. Paul areas where the schools were in need of ESL teachers, but none of the small towns could afford a full-time teacher. And besides, one of the reasons I was interested in teaching ESL was that I wanted to live in a big city, not a small town.

The teacher was also very pleased to speak with me since she knew that I had not only taught ESL both in the United States and overseas, but that I also had a master's degree in teaching ESL. She explained that none of the ESL teachers in the high school, and none of the candidates they had interviewed, were trained to teach ESL. They were all former teachers in the district who had been laid off from their positions as art, music, physical education, or home economics teachers as enrollments declined and budgets had to be cut. She looked forward to working with someone with training in teaching English, not just someone who spoke English.

After my interview with the teacher, I went back to see the principal. I asked him when he expected to make a decision about the position. He explained that he would be making the decision that weekend because he needed to have the teacher on board the following week. At that point, I offered to give him my home phone number because I could no longer be reached at the phone number he had used to set up the interview. He started to respond, but caught himself before he finished the sentence I heard him begin, "Oh, are you looking for a job?"

At that point, the light went on when I thought back to the precise words the woman at the International Institute of Minnesota had used - the principal of the high school was desperate to interview more candidates. He already had a candidate, but he couldn't hire that candidate until going through the motions of interviewing others.

For a few days, well months actually, I was annoyed at being pulled into this scenario, but it did make it clear to me that I was going to have to find something else I could be passionate about. At that point, I came up with a Plan A and a back-up Plan B. Plan A was to get into the Foreign Service. Plan B was to become a computer programmer to earn a living while I continued to take the annual written exam.

Plan B started looking like it would end up as my Plan A as I worked for five years for CPT Corporation in Eden Prairie during which time I took the written exam every December.  I had even started looking for a next position since moving from company to company was one of the only ways to be certain of higher salaries. In early December, I left CPT and began working for Network Systems in Brooklyn Park. Two weeks after I started there, I got a phone call offering me a position with the Department of State. All I had to do was decide if I wanted to join the class in January or in March.

I chose March, but I wouldn't have had that choice if I had gotten a job teaching ESL in that St. Paul high school. Sometimes a door has to slam shut in order for the door next to it to be seen.

And I am still a pretty decent programmer.