Hire me

Today was day 2 of a 2-day meat market/recruitment conference for independent schools. Yesterday I got all fancied up, dropped off the boy with a sitter, got dropped off at the train, and headed into town like a regular commuter. Once there, I spent the day in the Fairmont Copley Plaza with about 8 billion fellow candidates and 2 million school heads.

I was pretty lucky because I had 12 interviews yesterday. Then three today, for a total of 15. I guess most people had maybe 2-5 on average. Probably lots had more, but the folks sitting all day around the tables reading books and eating pretzels were plentiful and sad-looking.

15 interviews is a lot to absorb, and as someone who doesn't like talking about himself in general, it grew old quickly. The first interview this morning ended with the guy telling me he liked my resume, I'm still a candidate, but I didn't show the enthusiasm he wanted. He said he wasn't convinced it wasn't there, just that I didn't show it in the interview. I laughed and said I got up at 5:30 yesterday, took the train in, spent 2 hours prepping and fishing for add-on interviews to my 12 already scheduled, then had 11 back-to-back-to-back-to-back 1/2 hour interviews, then an hour break, then one more interview, then took the train home, slept a bit, got back up at 6, took the train again, and here I was, partially lost voice, sleep-deprived, sick of talking about myself and listening to people say "Our school is great because we're going to cut taxes, win the war, and defeat the Commies" over and over, and you say I'm not giving you enough enthusiasm? Go to hell.

Ok, I didn't put it quite like that. But I said some of that. Anyway, now I have to write back to the ones I liked, if I can figure out what my notes mean. I had to take notes, but I have lots of notes that mean nothing, where I was writing where they were saying something that they thought made them unique but really was just like every other school.

That said, I did think about 11 or 12 were good places to be. Of course, there are another 5 or 6 schools with my resume that I'd also like, but they're west coast schools not at this conference. There were a bunch of L.A. schools there, just not SF or Washington schools. There's another conf. in SF in March, maybe they go there. The L.A. people were a bit snotty. One was the "enthusiasm" guy. Another one I talked to yesterday and he seemed to be completely jaded and bitter about students being unwilling to learn. Dude, then why are you the head of a school?