dawn finley; dawn finley ph.d.; dawn finley vianney;

A Series of “First Dates”

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / Leave a comment

I am on the job market.

And it sucks.

I am excited about the prospects I have and I am excited about potentially making the shift from high school English to middle school English. There is also an Experiential Learning job I am interviewing for today that has me really excited.

But that excitement is so short lived.

It has been a while since I have had to look for a job and know that I MUST get one. My family has become accustomed to food, clothes, electricity, etc. It isn’t that dire really. My husband is the bread winner–but we need 2 incomes like most families in America.

The job search is slowing breaking my spirit. I know it shouldn’t. I know I am an amazing teacher and that I just need to find the right fit. But rejection sucks. The going back over “why” am I not moving on. It feels an awful lot like “why doesn’t he like me?”

I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t move on in the process of my very first interview. I was nervous and made the mistake of being succinct in place of selling myself. I didn’t use all of my time wisely.  So, I learned. I got better with each interview—I think.

I have had 9 first interviews. Of those 9, I secured 3 second interviews and was notified by a 4th that I was not moving on.

Of these second interviews:

  1. I was notified that for 1–big city public district that I was moved into the recommended for hire pool.  This means that a building principal can select me for a building level interview. Still more waiting and possible rejection.
  2. I was notified by another that I am not moving on in the process. I was one of 4 candidates brought in for the 2nd round.
  3. Second interview is set up for first week of April

I am still waiting to hear back from 4. I know that I will not hear back from at least 3 of them until the first week of April.

But this is hard. It is hard because you don’t know what it is that made them decide to pass you over. Was it that I didn’t use the right words? Did I not explain something as clearly as I could? Do I sound too ambitious, too pleasing, too pushy? Was it given to an internal candidate and you were just part of the process? Was it really just not a good fit? Was it that your outfit wasn’t exactly right? Were they looking for someone with less experience? Were they looking for someone less socially activist?

And we never know.  We never get the answers to these questions. We just have to go on to the next interview and hope that something different happens. We just have to stop second guessing and be ourselves and be authentic.

That for me is the hardest part–not the being authentic (full disclosure–that is partly why I am looking for a new job. I had to be me and know that where I was wasn’t a fit). It’s the accepting that maybe my authentic self isn’t appreciated or understood.  That no matter my experience, my education, my dedication to student, I am not what they are looking for.

How do I accept that?

 

 

Teaching Something That Matters

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / Leave a comment

I have to shake the dust off of this place. I’ve been absent and the cobwebs have fully taken over–both this space and my mind.  I have been consumed with teaching, learning, and parenting. My energy has been used to think and I am sad that my thinking (so much thinking) has not been written down–beyond tweets of 240 characters or less.

I started this post in April 2018 and here I am still working hard to teach something that matters. To make a difference in not just the lives of my students, but in the lives of the people they interact with.  That is a tall order.  I teach in an all-boys Catholic high school. Our demographics are 94% white and about 70% of our students are middle to upper-class. Our school tends to lean a bit to the conservative side.  I have been working over the last few years to disrupt the narratives my students have about others. They live in a pretty protected bubble of thought and it is important that they examine that thought before they move onto college, etc.

This semester I have decided to have my students listen to Scene on Radio’s Seeing White podcast. When I first listened to the podcast this past summer, I knew it was something that I wanted to include in my curriculum.  I just wasn’t sure how. I did a lot of thinking and contemplating and finally settled on listening to an episode a week (will fill our semester) and video responses via Flipgrid.  Scene on Radio has a curriculum guide that accompanies the podcast and I provide some of their questions as prompts to the video responses, to help guide students.

I will admit as the first responses are pouring in, that I am nervous. We aren’t a perfect school, but one of the main tenets of our school is Education for Service, Justice, and Peace.  I feel strongly as a parent, that we have to teach these values explicitly at times. I have also invited other faculty members in school to participate and several have expressed interest.  I feel it is important that my ideas aren’t the only ones that students hear.

I am pleasantly surprised that many students picked up on the idea of institutionalized racism and we’ll be doing some unpacking this week about racism (prejudice + power) and how that is entrenched in our founding and our institutions. We’ll talk about how “reverse” racism isn’t a thing and we will also be looking at logical fallacies.  After teaching logical fallacies, I am going to ask students to listen back to their first video responses and see if they used any fallacies–we had a lot of Straw man arguments happening as well as weak analogy and false dichotomy, and post hoc.

I am interested to see if they can recognize these fallacies in their own arguments, as well as the arguments that our politicians are making these days.

**edited to say that in January I resigned my position as the school and I were no longer a mission/vision fit. I am sad that I won’t get to see my students expand their thinking and be exposed to narratives that disrupt their biases.  But white supremacy requires the ignoring of history and there was a lot of resistance to my pushing of narratives that remind us of our White Privilege and how we have benefited from centuries of White Supremacy.