This might not be too clear, I’m writing from the bottom of a hole, my perception is limited by the soaring dirt walls on either side of me; the sky overhead is a bit vague and uncertain. It’s easy to doubt it’s sky at all; it could just as easily be facsimile: painted clouds on a cerulean board.
I started digging this hole back in October. There was an administrative position in my alma mater’s English department and I thought, “Well, it’s full-time and it’s down the street. There’d be benefits and a steady schedule. It’s something worth thinking about.” I tend to be pretty spontaneous with decisions and stuff like that and within a day or so, I emailed a former instructor, figuring he’d have some advice and maybe some insight, considering it was his institution. He wrote back pretty quick, I’m going to paraphrase a bit:
“Nice to hear from you! My advice is to apply to everything, but I would suggest scheduling a meeting with your boss. You’ve been at the college four years now. Ask about the possibility of a full-time position there. They might be willing to create something.”
I took him up on both ideas. I applied to the admin. job (and never heard anything back) and scheduled a meeting with the Dean of Arts and Humanities where I currently work. He missed the message in the first email and I had to write him again.
“Sorry if it wasn’t clear, but is it possible to schedule a meeting to discuss career possibilities?”
I felt like such a toady writing something like that. Perhaps I was asking for something that I hadn’t earned, but, of course, there’s the American value about speaking up and valuing yourself. Besides, the Dean was a nice guy. I figured if I was making an ass of myself, he’d tell me.
I met with him on Zoom a day later and made a case for a full-time position, framing it as though I were asking for more advice. He repeated what my former instructor had said, ‘apply to everything, even admin.’ But he added, ‘I’ve been thinking about putting in for a split Adult Ed. and English full-time position; I’ll talk to the director of Adult Ed.’
The full-time position potential was exciting, but a long-shot. I knew the English department had put in for full-time positions in the past and they’d been denied by the higher-ups. In my four years, I’d only seen one go through and that was for classes in the prison in Crescent City—I assumed there was different funding for that. Hence the approval.
And yet, I was hopeful. The previous summer I’d been informed that the president wanted to visit my class. I’d stressed out about the visit, but it had gone pretty well. He’d sat in the corner nodding quite a bit, which was something, given it was the first time I’d taught poetry. Later that week, he visited my English composition class as well. There must’ve been something to appreciate if he’d visited two, right? Ultimately, the president would be the one to approve any new full-time position requests. Perhaps he’d appreciated (or heard about) my work forging a connection with the local high schools and creating a path between non-credit and credit classes. Maybe he’d see this position as a way to honor and continue that work. After all, it had benefitted the college as well as the students and I’d made some pretty good connections outside the purview of most associate faculty.
Just before the holiday break two things happened. One the president invited me to present on my experience teaching overseas to his Rotary Club and, two, the full-time position was approved. It was hard not to feel that this was auspicious. At once, there was an opportunity for a full-time position and a sort of presidential nod. If he’d thought me a lousy teacher, it seemed unlikely he’d invite me to speak to the Rotary club. Right?
I woke up before dawn one morning at the end of the holiday break, gulped some coffee and started the ride, in the dark, down the highway to Eureka. There weren’t too many cars out yet and the dawn had been forestalled by the cloudy weather that had come down the mountains to meet the ocean. The sun couldn’t quite break through and glowed dully behind the mountains like backlighting.
Arriving in Eureka, I had the sudden realization that I must’ve gotten the time wrong. It must’ve been for 7pm, not 7am; what kind of group met at 7am on a weekday? I’d woken up early and come out for nothing and I’d have to come back at 7pm, once again in the damn dark.
The café’s posted hours said they opened at 7:30, but the door was open and there was someone inside, seemingly standing in line. I slipped in the propped open door and approached the counter with the awkward mien of someone not entirely awake and uncertain if a place is open.
“’Rotary Club?’ Oh yeah,” The barista informed me. “We open early so they can have their meeting. They’re in that room.”
That early in the morning, it was a surreal experience. No one was masked—to be fair they were drinking coffee—but since I wasn’t, I kept my mask on and couldn’t help but to feel that this looked offensive. We began with the pledge of allegiance—which I haven’t said since I was in high school—standing there, trying to remember the words, I felt like I was parodying it. I wasn’t even sure I had the right hand up and in the right place, but I was too uncomfortable to look down and check. Then there was a prayer. And throughout the whole thing, I’m standing there, drawing stares or seemingly drawing stares from the club’s members. Who the hell was this pinko in their midst who seemed uncertain how to do the pledge and only partially bowed his head during the prayer. In our secular nation, it’s bewildering to be confronted with both patriotism and religion at such an early hour. These are things with proscribed responses and not using these responses with alacrity has seditious overtones and yet, well, they’re profoundly personal. We have varied relationships to God and country—our freedom allows us to express these and yet, well, in certain situations, it’s expected that one will fall in line. My appreciation for this country lies in things like my gratitude for pedestrian rights of way and the lack of a social contract that would force me to behave a certain way. But those things aren’t part of the pledge. To me, the pledge is about relevant as a druid chant on the equinox. I stood there, half-awake, saying those weighty words, trying not to think about the problems that had resulted from their varied interpretation. The announcement of a prayer was just bewildering.
When I looked up from the prayer—perhaps a little too late in trying to look reverent— the meeting had begun with news. So-and-so in the hospital, wants everyone to pray, fire department sponsoring a toy donation drive, etc. Being the only person in the room with a mask, I felt I had a gag on. The damn thing kept creeping up into my eyes as I swallowed nervously. I was continually reaching up to tug it back down and, when I did this, it seemed the motion always caught someone’s attention.
The president, who’d invited me, wasn’t in attendance and was meeting virtually. Without a familiar face and with the necessity of sitting through the beginning of the meeting my presentation seemed non sequitur, like I’d presentation-bombed this group with something radical and uncalled for. “The Peace Corps? Cultural Relativism? What is this shit?” It’d been a while since I’d stood in front of group of unmasked people. I struggled to make the lessons of life in Armenia interesting or relevant. I struggled to explain why the experience gave me my own sort of pledge of allegiance. Who knows what the Rotary Club got out of it, but they were polite and clapped and asked questions at the end. I hung around a second at the end, but it was apparent everyone was off to work. The room emptied out pretty quick.
And yet, it felt like a success, no one had been wowed, but I’d gone in and done what had to be done and made it as interesting as I could. One guy had stuck around to ask me a few more questions and to chat a little. The president had now seen me “instruct” three very different rooms of people. Perhaps this presentation and my triumph over strangeness would count for something in consideration of the full-time position.
This was back when all kinds of things seemed possible.
Running with the advice I’d gotten to ‘apply for everything’ I’d spent the entire break working on applications. I’d met with a colleague to revise my CV. I’d sent my cover letter and teaching philosophy statement to a friend—also an English teacher—to review. Applying for teaching positions is a probing and exhaustive effort. It’s a bit like going to the dentist because you sit with yourself, mull over your thoughts, but while one part of you is perfectly at rest, another part is being strained to the limit. Instead of your teeth, it’s your experience, your value as an educator that’s being taxed. You are writing a letter of interest that responds to a college’s mission and values statements. You are writing a teaching philosophy that considers the course sequence of the college to which you are applying, and you are answering specific diversity questions that take into account the demographics of the institution’s area. Do most students speak Korean or Spanish as a first language? How does that factor into how you’d teach ESL 212 which focuses on authentic writing to prepare for English 101, which has course learning outcomes which focus on communication in meaningful context. Each application is like a separate research project. If you don’t show that you’ve dug deep into this institution and considered how your skills could be a fit for colleagues, students, program and institution than, well, let’s just say when you don’t get an interview, they don’t even bother to notify you.
So, day after day during the break, I sat in a café researching institutions and doing things like making audio recordings responding to specific questions about teaching at the institution on top of the CV, letter of interest, teaching philosophy, diversity statement and responses to specific questions. But, hell, I was happy that there were any positions at all, Covid had all but wiped out the possibility of any full-time work. I checked Higher Ed Jobs about once a day, and I hadn’t seen anything that wasn’t ‘adjunct’ in a couple of years and, suddenly, here were five positions, full-time and in places that I’d like to live. Usually when these positions come up there were in suburban New Jersey or Dallas. No offense to either, but I know no one who lives within 100 miles of either and, with two small children, well, it felt important that we only contemplate moves to places where we’d feel somewhat familiar and where we knew someone within half a day’s drive.
But, well, I never expected to hear back from any of these places. I’d been applying to positions for about five years and in all that time, I’d gotten a single interview that was over almost as soon as it began. I hadn’t realized there was a format to answering interview questions for colleges. Until that interview, I’d always given honest answers, considering my experience which had been well-suited to the discussion-like format of the interviews. This had been enough for part-time, volunteer and fellowship positions, but I’d learned that full-time was an entirely different league where they gave you a battery of scripted questions—sometimes in advance, sometimes not—you prepared a teaching demonstration and none of this was discussed. The panel, after they gave the questions, said nothing, just made notes. So, to be successful, one had to have one’s lines down very well: you were expected to monologue meaningfully on your experience.
I didn’t expect to hear from the other places I’d applied to, but I did hope to get an interview for the Adult Ed. / English position that I couldn’t help but to feel I’d had a hand in creating at the college where I worked. After the announcement about this position had gone out, a few people had even contacted me. “This was made for you!” they told me. “Well,” I couldn’t help but to think, “in a way, it was made by me.”
I didn’t let this talk get to me, though; I didn’t want to take anything for granted. Yes, I’d been the only faculty member working in both departments. Yes, I’d done a lot to bring these departments together. Yes, this was all following recent legislation that the college wanted to show they were conforming to. And yes, I had numbers to demonstrate my success. Still, that didn’t mean I had any right to the position. I still had to prove this and luckily, in late February, I was told I’d be given a chance to do this. I’d gotten an interview.
Happy as I was, I felt slightly conflicted about the interview. This was a career-level job. It would essentially cement my family to this place. There were pros and cons. We’d been trying to buy a house for years, unsuccessfully; the housing crisis in coastal California was about as pronounced as it got. Even with a better-paying job, I wasn’t sure we could afford a house with increasing prices. I’d also spent 2008-2016 moving to a new country every two years. I had grown accustomed to a more sedentary lifestyle since having kids, but being sedentary in the moment vs. being sedentary for the next twenty years or so were very, very different things. Although I knew we were fairly stable, I always felt the possibility that we could move if something came along. With a tenure-track full-time job, there’d be no reason to leave if I got it. We’d grow old here. But, of course, I’d be turning 39 in a month, I was already growing old.
And there were the other jobs I’d applied to in places like Seattle, Portland and Santa Rosa. All of which felt like places I’d rather live in and places my wife also wouldn’t hate. She might not want to move, but, given the option between suburban New Jersey and Seattle, well, convincing her might be a little easier. What if I landed the job here and then got an interview for Seattle. Would I spend my life asking, “what if?”
But I couldn’t anticipate getting interviews for any of these positions. And I had an interview for this position. I also had a bit of home court advantage, so, I reasoned, it would be worth it to throw everything I had into this position. Maybe years down the road it would mean something else. But, for now, it was enough. Besides, we’d come to think of this place as home. My wife and both my kids were born here. Yes, it was expensive and the competition for non-descript, two-bedroom homes was at the level of over half a million dollars cash, but, people had been telling us for years that it was always possible some old hippy would want to sell to a young family regardless of price. Just because nothing of the kind had yet occurred didn’t mean it was impossible and maybe, with my salary doubling if I got the job, I could expand the search a little, too.
The interview was scheduled for the first week of March, before spring break. If I passed muster, I’d move on to the second interview to be scheduled later. I got the questions in advance and spent an entire morning in the café writing essay-length responses to them and then printing these out and pouring over them, highlighting the most relevant parts of the responses and reading them out loud. I ended up with pages of highlighted text and about 300 ideas and concepts rattling around in my head.
The problem was the only opening they had for an interview was right after my Monday morning class. I’m not sure if that was on purpose or what, but I’ve since realized that most interviews are scheduled for Monday morning, so there must be some logic in it. Mondays, I’m always a little slow to get started and right after class, I’m usually a little worn out and, well, brain-dead. I’ve noticed that it’s the time of the day when I’m most likely to stare blankly at the screen in front of me.
But I continued practicing the questions right up until the day of the interview. Before class that fated Monday, I had an extra cup of coffee and felt like I was ready enough when the spinning Zoom wheel: “please wait for your host to begin the meeting” suddenly broke and six faces appeared before me, expectant, indifferent and, even, bored. Zoom. How can you tell what anyone is thinking on Zoom? And how can you talk when you don’t know what your audience is thinking?
What I’ve since learned to do is to focus on the most receptive face and ignore the others. In most interviews, one face is more ebullient than the others. When this face smiles and imperceptibly nods at your answers, you gain confidence, leading, hopefully, to more smiling and nodding. The challenge becomes: ‘please this face’ and this is a hell of a lot easier than explaining every conceivable facet of your experience in a 45–90-minute monologue. I was a radio station DJ as an undergraduate and the means of communication in each situation is comparable. It’s easy to talk yourself into a corner and it’s awkward to reset yourself when you do. In something as subjective as this type of interview, especially for a teacher—where communication is the lion’s share of what you do—I can’t imagine that talking yourself into a corner wouldn’t count against you. So, in a way, you’re being marked on oratory skills, as well as content knowledge.
That first interview, I felt encouraged. I saw a nodding face and I focused on sharing my knowledge and experience in a way that would make it nod and maybe even smile. Certain subjects seemed to cause the face consternation; I changed them in favor of those that brought the nods back. The other blank faces, some of them belonging to colleagues I never felt I’d been able to make an impression on for whatever the reason, were, frankly, terrifying, enough that just a glance at them confused my message. But the nodding face brought me back on track and worked up my passion. That’s the best advice I can give if you have a Zoom interview: find the most genial face, talk to it and ignore the others.
I found out within a day or two that I had been selected for the second round of interviews to follow spring break, again on a Monday, but in two parts so that the first part would come before my class, early in the morning and second part would follow my class. This interview would also have questions which would not be given beforehand and a teaching presentation, thankfully not a teaching demonstration. It was a relief that I didn’t have to treat the faces on the Zoom interview panel as participants in a “mock lesson” but rather only had to present an assignment sequence to them. Looking back, I wonder if perhaps this would be one of the reasons I didn’t get the position.
Before the break, I created the presentation, bringing in student numbers, student learning objectives, authentic responses to assignments and language from assignments. It was like being audited on my instruction and I had to show all my receipts of students’ achievement. I went back and forth on the presentation. Having no questions to prepare for, I trimmed the presentation, added to it, trimmed it some more and finally just said, “all right, let’s just leave it for a while.” But I frankly had no idea how much information to give. I could justify every aspect of the sequence, but did I need to?
I needed a break, from all the strain of maintaining classes, preparing applications, readying for interviews, and watching blank faces on Zoom. We took a trip to Seattle to visit friends. I’d also applied to two schools up there, and, well, you never knew, maybe I’d still hear from one of those. If I did, it’d be nice to have recently taken a look around up there.
We came back five days later, full of vegan donuts and the cool humid air that soughs the pines of the Pacific Northwest. In a way, coming back confirmed my decision to focus on the interview for my college. I was happy to be home and realized that a move to Seattle might be a bit of a crazy idea, even if I had once preferred crazy ideas, I was less inclined to take them up now. Since having kids, my life had contracted around my family. I no longer cared much about the entertainment options that would’ve drawn me to a larger city. It was enough just to find some time to read and have a cup of coffee without interruption.
I spent another couple of mornings after we’d returned looking over the presentation and reviewing a mammoth list of potential interview questions, but I found it hard to focus on so many ‘potential’ questions. Once I’d spent more than 15 minutes on an answer, I thought “well, who knows if they’re even going to ask this? I can’t spend too much time thinking about this.” I’d move onto the next question, but then I’d feel like the previous answer had been somehow incomplete.
Mikey came up for a quick visit at the end of the week and we went bike camping Saturday night. I thought this would be just what I’d need to relax a little before the interview, but the cold and marauding raccoons had kept me up most of the night and the next night, Sunday, the night before the interview, I started to feel anxious.
Since my daughter was born a few years ago, I’ve had anxiety-induced bouts of insomnia. It began, I think, with worrying about the new life I’d brought into the world; a life that was part of mine, but that was, improbably, sleeping in a bouncy chair on the floor (it was the only place she’d sleep; I should add that another factor was probably that she didn’t sleep much anyway, so I’d gotten somewhat accustomed to waking up at odd hours and my circadian rhythm became more like a circadian beat which varied greatly depending on the song being played.) My worry would wake me up in the night and I’d have to check and make sure she was still breathing, even if it meant waking her up. Even if I didn’t wake her up, after being flooded with the adrenalin of parental worry, I’d have a hard time falling back asleep.
I must’ve gotten accustomed to the insomnia because it would periodically reemerge, even after my daughter had outgrown the possibility of SIDS and had become a healthy young child who could easily remove an errant blanket or pillow from her face in her sleep. It was usually the same scenario, I’d wake up after about two hours of sleep and starting mulling over some problem that would, in the dark, seem much, much worse than it had looked by the light of day. I know it’s cliché, but damn if the most mundane things don’t look terrifying when you think about them lying down. As the problem assumed titanic proportions, I’d become more awake and, within 10 minutes, I’d find myself wide awake. Reading could distract me, but it couldn’t bring sleep back and I’d watch the hours pass by until, usually about an hour before I had to wake up, I’d finally fall asleep.
Often, the problem that would begin to coalesce when I woke in the middle of the night was only that of sleep itself. I’d immediately think “shit, I’m awake; I should be asleep. I need rest!” and this thought would be enough to drive sleep away for the rest of the night, especially because due to all the interruptions of a toddler and an infant (we’d since had another kid), my circadian beat had become more of a circadian murmur. No matter how little sleep I got, when something woke me up, I never felt that teenage desire for just one more minute. When I was up, I was up like a dog who goes from whimpering in his sleep to bolting out of the door after a squirrel.
So, Sunday night, after not sleeping much the night before on the camping trip, when I woke up after about an hour, I knew what I was in for. Lying awake, when I had any thought, any thought at all, I imagined a stop sign—trying to block the possibility of thought. I lay there thinking about stop signs until about 2 am, when I finally had to go to the living room to read and change my environment. It felt like a great achievement when I feel asleep about two and half hours before I had to get up. I hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep, but I’d beat the insomnia and managed not to stay up all night; that’s what I’d been most afraid of. It’s the worst when you’re still awake and your alarm goes off. At least I’d gotten a transition.
However, this meant I’d only had about five or six hours of sleep combined in the last two nights. My thoughts were sluggish, even in conversation with my wife before I went off to work and my interviews, I was stumbling over my words.
The first part of the interview was just a conversation with the VP of Instruction—it was pretty informal and, when she revealed the only question she really had was “well, why do you want the job?” I loosened up quite a bit; perhaps this would go alright.
After class, I went back to the familiar Zoom room, seeing the familiar faces. The questions would come first and then the presentation portion. Again, I focused on the nodding head in the grid of otherwise unresponsive heads, but, when I started giving answers, instead of eliciting nods, I seemed to be gradually raising the eyebrows and even turning down the corners of the mouth on the face I was focused on. ‘Dammit, change focus, answer this question with a different experience, with another lesson,’ my mind screamed while I talked and smiled, but no, the face had become frozen in a mask of perplexity. I shuddered to think what the other faces were doing, probably all but frowning and tsk-tsking at my ignorance.
The worst thing that happens when an interview doesn’t go well is that you begin to feel like you’re wasting everyone’s time. You’ve bombed. They’ve all made up their minds already, but, improbably, you’ve got 45 minutes left of talking to do. Once this thought presents itself, you lose heart, you babble with a big fake smile. Two decades of experience teaching leaks out your ears and you become a random person stopped on the street and asked a complex and specific question that you feel you must attempt to answer while having no knowledge of the subject. You become, effectively, a bullshitter, and everyone knows it.
I may have gotten a few theoretical punches in, but the bulk of the Q and A consisted of such bullshitting alternated with rambling. Once I was knocked down, the lack of sleep, made it difficult to get back up again. Then, horribly, that expressionless grid of faces announced they were giving me five minutes to prepare my presentation after the questions were done. I had to turn off my screen and be utterly alone with myself after the half-answered questions and stuttering replies. It was terrible, I couldn’t see my presentation—which I had open on the desktop— I only saw my own miserable face reflected back in the screen and then, one by one, the boxes came to life again, the expectant faces had returned. I took a deep breath and began again. There was a lot of information on the screen; too much, it turned out.
The next two weeks were agonizing. When I’d finished the first interview, I hadn’t even thought about the results, but I’d swiftly been invited to the second round. Now that things hadn’t gone well, but without an answer or an objective assessment of the interview, I was riddled with superstition, seeing portents and prognostications in everything. Everything in the universe strained toward a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ orientation and each of these, for me, were related to whether I’d gotten the job. The most agonizing thing was that I knew that immediately following the interview, the decision had been made, if not formally at least in the minds of the interview panel, but I’d have to wait weeks before I’d hear it.
From one hour to the next, I’d convince myself that I’d either bombed the interview or had done alright. According to the moment, these both seemed like totally probable results. Yet, an ominous silence was growing and, at times, while I tried to go through my daily routine, it seemed to almost rise up and choke everything around me until I felt like calling HR and pleading with them just to tell me something and rid me of the terrible suspense made all the more terrible because it was false suspense; I knew the answer in my heart, but then, I’d see a leaf fall off a tree in a certain way and think “well, perhaps I’m wrong—maybe it wasn’t as bad as all that. That leaf is pointing to letter ‘H’ on the sidewalk. In Armenian, ‘yes’ is ‘ha’. Therefore, blah, blah blah.” It was both ridiculous and agonizing, like something out of Kafka.
In this nightmare, however, there was a flicker of hope. The day after the second interview, when I was feeling absolutely horrible, I missed a call from a college in Seattle. “Could I call back to schedule an interview?” The message asked. It was only the second interview I’d ever had with an institution that I’d had no previous contact with. My sense of dread dissipated a little, but, still, I knew now there were no guarantees and I felt it was ridiculous to throw over the position I’d been so close to in favor of such an unknown where I stood much less of a chance. But, it was something that offered affirmation and a second chance when I so desperately needed it.
I couldn’t focus at work. I checked my email twice an hour, at a minimum. I didn’t have reception on my phone in the office where I worked, so I made an excuse to step outside every chance I could. Again, the silence swelled and grew portentous and burdensome until it began to feel as though I were constantly soaked by a cold rain one from which I could neither extricate myself nor become inured to as one sometimes does in a cold drizzle. The not knowing about something that would so clearly alter the course of my life, was maddening, and it wasn’t so much not knowing, as the incessant guessing my mind wouldn’t stop doing. Every day, after 5pm, when there would be no response, I’d sink into a blank torpor, only to begin again when anxiety woke me up at 5 am.
After a week, I did contact HR. I tried to be tactful. They told me an answer would be coming soon. Probably early this week. Probably. No one knew anything concretely. Why all the mystery? Why couldn’t they just say a time when I would know? Why couldn’t the process be more transparent and predictable? Why did I feel like I’d given up my rights to any agency in life after I’d subjected myself to the scrutiny of an interview?
All day Monday and all day Tuesday, I checked my phone and email like a teenager who has just offered a declaration of love over voicemail and awaits a reply. It was a sickeningly familiar feeling, but one with new stakes and a much less mercurial judgement. In the back of my mind, when rejected for dates in high school, I’d always acknowledged that each person had personal tastes and that a rejection didn’t necessarily comment on my character. I knew I’d rejected people who had been perfectly good human beings it’s just that there wasn’t a spark as I saw it. No matter how much I liked someone, I understood that if the feeling wasn’t reciprocated, it wasn’t because I was imperfect, but while I tried to tell myself the same about the interview, well, it was an interview, and they were experts. If I didn’t get the job, it was because I wasn’t good enough. Period. No amount of consoling would convince me otherwise.
And that’s the awful thing; they’ll try to console you anyway. They tell you their applicant pool was exceptionally strong, that they had a lot of applicants and that they were, frankly, surprised by the exceptional quality of all the candidates, that you were a strong contender, but all this is worthless palaver. The message is clear. We chose the best. You weren’t the best. Our judgement was sound and unbiased and objective. You, objectively, were not the best candidate, making you less than ideal. Try to reason out of that. You can’t. It’s like when a court has made a decision. It can be overturned, but the language on job applications asks “have you ever been convicted?”. Regardless of what was overturned later, you were convicted; you are marked; you are changed. Again with the Kafka.
Wednesday afternoon and still no word. My class ended at 12:20 and my tutoring session in the library started at 2:00. I finished sending messages out to the students and preparing for next week (as best as I could with my seriously compromised attention) when I started across campus to the library. Still nothing on my phone when I walked back into the service area.
At the door of the library, I thought… was it? Was that the Dean? He’d been on the interview panel. I didn’t know if I should make eye contact. He was talking to someone. I would have to walk right under his nose, but I was uncertain, not wanting to interrupt, I gave a half-hearted wave and nod, about to slip into the doors. God, my heart speeds up just thinking about it.
“Jonny,” the dean turned from his conversation, and I saw it on his face right away. You’d think after all the waiting there’d be some modicum of relief, but it still come as stomach-bottoming out disappointment. In the moment, you’d gladly return to the agony of not knowing, if only for another moment of staving the irreversible moment off. But, even after his face has said it all, he most give it words.
“I’m sorry, man. The pool of applicants was …” But all I hear is ‘I’m sorry’ echoing on and on. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” We are done. This is all there is to the message. There’s no going back. I go back over the history: October (meeting about positions), November (position approved), December (work on application) and on through, what is this, April? Jesus. Just let the ground swallow me. I have deluded myself. I have flown too high.
I try to be bright in my response “hey, no big deal,” but this is such bullshit, that I change mid-sentence to just saying “thanks”. It’s the only honest thing I can say that doesn’t end with me wringing my hands.
Thankfully, our engagement was very brief, and it was busy in the tutoring center. I worked with a student on a Spanish assignment, which almost never happened. But, still, what was I doing here? I wasn’t first pick. Was I even second? Did I belong here?
I guess this is an especially poignant question because teachers, in their position of authority on a subject, often doubt themselves, especially as the application of that knowledge isn’t objectively clear and relies, to a large extent, on the individual student’s engagement. What is a good teacher to one, might not be to another. I don’t build homes that stand the test of time. I don’t complete surgeries that restore the patient’s health; I don’t create software that does aggregates information in a useful way. I profess to explain writing and language and to offer supported practice with new concepts in a way that leads to understanding and a personally valuable practice. Hell yes, I doubt that I am good at that. Every day I doubt that I am good at something so difficult to quantify, especially when I hear my colleagues talking about how difficult it is to quantify it. Then I really wonder about what I am doing. So, when a panel of tenured English faculty, the position I aspire to, declare that I’m not their first pick, well, there’s some tacit acknowledgment that, by extension, I’m not very good at this at all.
…
For a few days, I avoided eye contact with people. Not only people I didn’t know well, but even my wife. Somehow when anyone addressed me, my instinct was to turn away, as if I was constantly expecting more bad news; another rejection, perhaps. And all this turning away, made me feel resentful, as if the people I were conversing with were somehow getting me to turn away on purpose, as if they were commanding me to avert my gaze. I felt sick with bitterness but lacking anyone to heap it on, I choked on it and seethed with it.
And each night, I’d wake up around 2 or 3. Maybe it would be my infant son crying, but most of the time, I’d just find myself inexplicably awake, looking around the dark room thinking “it’s over; you ruined it; you botched it. You can’t get it back.” At least before the interviews, there’d still been some kind of hope, but I couldn’t expect that the committee would call me out of the blue and say they’d made a mistake. There was no going back.
Throughout this, if you remember, there was the interview for the school in Seattle. I may have missed my opportunity here, but I had a shot at once elsewhere. The interview wasn’t scheduled until the end of April, so I had plenty of time to prepare. I tried not to feel to hopeful, but it was nice to have something to look forward to.
And then, in early April, I got an email with “congratulations” in the subject heading from Santa Rosa Junior College; I’d been accepted for an interview there as well. A week or so later, Portland Community College sent me a similar email. After years of myriad applications and no response, my fortunes changed. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to stay where I was anyway. I’d long been wanting to relocate, to move closer to a large airport to make travel back to see my family easier and while I’d become comfortable where I lived, I found myself feeling excited over the prospect of moving to a big city with more amenities. A library that was open on Sundays, for example, museums. I knew from experience how challenging these interviews were and that they all had multiple stages, but I’d really hedged my bets. With three of them, how could I lose? For a while, my failure seemed insignificant, a step along the way to a greater success.
Throughout April, I purged myself of the botched interview with new interview preparation. I researched programs, created mock classes to present, completed “interview homework”—one college had assigned homework in addition to the teaching demonstration—I revisited everything I’d done for the first interview and tried to do it better. But, despite having gone through all the preparation, once already, I wasn’t able to cull any valuable lessons from it because each institution was so different and, predictably, their interviews were similarly different.
The stock response candidates give when they don’t get the job is that it was a “learning experience”. They explain that going through the whole process revealed certain things about the way it worked. Well, either I was incredibly dense or this was fragrantly untrue. As far as I could see, there was no single way to do this and be successful. The panel would be made up of people and, people being people, responded differently to different things, regardless of the rubric in front of them. For example, Portland Community College mentioned their emphasis in creativity in the interview, seeming to encourage a creative response, while one of the Seattle colleges, had a large and well-regarded international studies program as well as refugee students, so, a varied demographic the needed addressing. So, instead of drawing from any particular lesson from my failed attempt, I spent all my time crafting specific responses for each school.
…
The night before the first interview, plagued with memories from the last interview, I couldn’t sleep, but I managed to get about five hours in. The interview was on my birthday and I thought this might help me to feel a little more confident about it. If there was ever a day for narcissism, it was one’s birthday and interviews, more or less, invite narcissism. Also, I figured a good interview could be a gift to myself. My wife and I planned to go out to eat after the late-afternoon interview and, in the meantime, I spent the day reading and rereading the notecards I’d written, pacing around, writing the notecards over again in better handwriting and then writing the primary points from them again.
Just before the interview, my wife took the kids to the park and I went skating to clear my mind of all the nervous energy I’d been accumulating throughout the day. I skated for maybe 20 minutes, but couldn’t stop checking the time; I finally decided it was close enough to the time to begin and bounded back into the house, air punching and jumping up and down like an athlete before some big time trial. I’m embarrassed to recount this, but after the recent failure, I felt incredibly anxious of botching an answer early in the interview, and I knew how important it was to start the meeting with a grin and an effortless correct answer. The physical warm-up helped me to feel a little calmer, even if it did look incredibly stupid. Luckily, no one was home.
I logged into Zoom. The spinning wheel turned benignly on the screen. “ESL Full-Time Preliminary Interviews 1 hr. Check Audio.” The time for the interview arrived and still the wheel spun. A minute passed. 5:01 I took a deep breath. 5:02. I smiled. Told myself it would be fine and then the wheel paused and six faces rose up on the screen. They introduced themselves. Gave me a moment to introduce myself and then, the scripted questions began.
I’d seen these questions beforehand, so I had been able to, more-or-less memorize fairly elaborate responses. But they didn’t come out wooden or list-like. I found myself recounting them. Telling what my experiences had been. The interview panel became a group of like-minded colleagues. There were no follow-up questions or commentary, so it was just the prepared questions and my responses, but somehow I felt like I’d created a sense of dialogue with my responses. I felt good about this, it was encouraging. There was also that lone smiling and nodding head in my view that I was able to focus on and speak to. I was encouraged and supported. I elaborated my responses. I made my points clearly and when it was over and I said good bye and thank you to the faces I’d just poured myself out to, I jumped up and yelled. I’d done it! It had gone well! My self-confidence had been restored. I wasn’t an imposter; I knew my stuff! I ran out the door to my birthday dinner, beaming, thrilled to face the future again.
I won’t detail the second season of rise and fall that followed, needless to say, it was much like the first. I went through three more preliminary interviews, two teaching demonstrations, a finalist interview and, in the end, was awarded no job. I had labored intensely from October to May and, in the end, I was no better off. Nothing I’d done could be used again, none of the interviews would qualify me for another position. No group of superiors had noted my accomplishments and contribution. Or, if they had, it hadn’t mattered.
I got the final “Sorry, really competitive pool of applicants” call during finals week and what is usually the most jubilant and exciting time of year for me collapsed into a week-long rumination on my failures. Was it enough that I’d been considered at all? Or had my CV and application materials merely belied something that I wasn’t able to live up to in person? The only thing I’d taken from the experience was the realization that applying and interviewing—if I wanted a full-time position in higher ed –would have to become part of my job. I’d have to cultivate an understanding of it the way I’d cultivated an understanding of my subject knowledge and then cultivated a way of explaining what I knew to students in a way they would benefit from and make personal After this fashion, I’d have to cultivate a way to talk about my own experience with these things. I thought I was able to do this already, but, it seemed there was more to it.
I don’t feel any more familiar or comfortable with the process than I did back in March when I had the first interview. I can’t say I’ve appreciated the experience because there was so much back and forth in it, so much celebrating what I knew to be my best work and best portrayal of my abilities in an awkward and staid situation, followed by what felt to be a very situational and subjective dismissal of this. This would send me in a tailspin of self-doubt that I’d have to pull myself out of before the next interview and, again, I’d ride a wave of self-confidence until I was shot down.
The question after things like this is usually “would you do it all again?” In this case, the question is altered slightly to “are you going to do it all again? Put yourself through all the ups and downs, all the suspense, the blows to your self-confidence?” Well, it seems the only way to justify all the work I’ve done so far is to keep doing it, to keep applying, interviewing and hope for the chance alignment of institutional need with my unique experience. There’s little else to do but feel sorry for myself, and the summer is simply not the time for such behavior. It helps greatly to have kids who consistently remind you that you’re perhaps taking the whole thing a bit too seriously anyway. After all, if Kafka taught us anything, it’s that this hole is self-imposed and entirely imagined and the only way to avoid living in it is to stop digging. Once again, I lie awake at night, imagining stop signs and, for now, it seems to be working.
