Opportunity/ New Year Resolution

I should have blogged about this sooner, just so we'd have some suspense and resolution, ;-) but now it's more like an announcement.

It's not an opportunity for me -- I already have one in place (the online "thing" -- I don't like to call it teaching because it really isn't, it's only part of teaching. They call it facilitating.) and I shouldn't let it slip away, so I'm trying to fight for it, and I'll be looking for more opportunities soon.

So, here's my one official New Year Resolution:

I will be proactive about looking for jobs. I will look into anything, private high school/prep school, adjuncting in colleges and universities, editing, curatorship, librarianship, anything that could possibly and even remotely fit me. Even a couple of local faculty jobs ;-). And, hopefully, I will have one or more "real" or "marginal" jobs come fall.

The opportunity is for K, and this one came so easily and quickly that I'm just still stunned and happy, in a good way. It will be a lot of work for him, and when I say that I mean it, since it's a class that he's not even taken before, let alone taught. But I'm confident he can do it.

So, on Sunday or Monday, he received an email from his close friend and recent tt faculty at Penn (the one who had a loong three year job search but who ended up with five job offers last year!) who is, incidentally, vacationing in Brazil right now (he's from there too). Our friend had been contacted by a dept. chair of a local university -- the closet university to us, BTW! -- saying that they needed an adjunct instructor to begin teaching a class next week! K emailed the dept. head and heard back from him on Monday night. Today it was confirmed that he starts teaching next Wednesday night (the same day I travel to Brazil... good thing we already have several people who can babysit, yay!).

K is aprehensive, but he desperatetly needs (and I cannot emphasize this enough) teaching experience in his CV/resume! He never taught here in the U.S., just did research, but he is an excellent teacher -- he taught middle school and high school in Brazil for 6.5 years and he did really well. In his concursos (competition to enter a tenure track job in Brazil) people were impressed with the classes he taught. In spite of that, the lack of teaching experience in his CV is a real problem when applying for teaching colleges although it's pretty irrelevant when applying for R1 (research focused) universities.

And it doesn't stop here! There is a tt faculty post open at the same university that K was already planning to apply to (and will), it just is not in the same department, but in one "related" to the one where he will be teaching. Isn't that just unbelievable?

So, I'm glad to be the bearer of good news here in this blog. In spite of the fact that this will make life more complicated for K and interfere with his day job (the postdoc), it will have two great advantages: provide him with t he experience he needs and help pay the mortgage (two months' worth). I'm quite happy and I think that K is too.