Sub Vision: The Price of the Freedom to Choose

It is the dream of every full time employee to be able to choose, spontaneously, days to be absent from work. Working full time at a software company, and later as a full time teacher, I didn’t have that luxury. For a teacher, taking a day off, for any good reason, is often more of a headache than going to works…

As a substitute teacher, I do have this privilege. I can plan ahead my vacation days, and even decide not to accept a job the evening before, or the morning of. I don’t usually take advantage of that when I am committed to an assignment, but when I am on daily calls it is just too tempting to say ‘No’ to a job…

However, there is a price for that. A day not worked is a day not paid. It is hard to plan a schedule, as there is no guarantee to getting a job on the next day. So, I am left to gamble on my financial situation.

Many of our trips are coordinated by friends overseas, and according to their holidays and days off. It helps the expense of the trips since these are not necessarily at top US travel season, but then it costs workdays. A trip in September caused me to miss work at the start of the school year, and a second trip, carefully crafted not to miss quality time with my family here, and keep flight prices low, left me with only few working days both in November and in December.

I chose to travel at the end of November, thus working half of the month, enjoying Thanksgivings with my family, and then taking off, planning to return early enough in December to work for at least ten days.

It almost worked. I had a job planned for right after I arrived, and were hoping to work more on the following week, before the holidays’ vacation starts. However, I arrived at the midst of a bad fire season and school was cancelled, and the following week was finals week and my services were not needed...

It would have not been as alarming had it not been for the fact that I needed at least one working day a month to keep my health insurance, and I was worried I won’t get even that one day. Luckily, a friend had asked me to cover her class on the Monday of the last week of the semester. During the following days of finals, the phone was completely silent...

By Friday of that week, I realized I am now in a long stretch of school vacation that started on the week of Thanksgiving and would end after the first week of January… seven weeks of vacation, with only one day of work… (almost) by my choice…

Sub Vision: Get a Job… or better yet – a Career!

When a sales person calls and manages to bypass my answering machine to get to me, I get furious about a system that allows anybody to intrude my privacy at my special time. If a stranger breaks into someone’s home, he is a violator, and faces fierce consequences, so why invading someone’s space is not a violation?

The point that I want to make, however, is not about my frustration; it is about the people who are behind these calls. I want to tell them ‘young people, is this the best you can do with your life? Is calling people at home, trying to sell them something they don’t need, something you probably won’t buy - Is this the best way you can do to make a living? Aren’t you wasting your life?’

As I grow older, my attitude toward all young people is a mixture of parental and educational approach. I want to tell them not to waste time and energy on unimportant matters, to approach money as a mean, not as a goal, and a job as a career of the type that (as I heard once) they would do even if not paid to do it.

I am aware of a ready criticism toward someone who grew up, and raised kids, in a normal family situation, with values, education, and financial stability. And of course, any honest job is better than no job. We all had temporary situations when any honest job was OK; cleaning houses, babysitting or telemarketing. For a student with young family, or a person who supports an elderly parent, every job is respectable! But once situation is stabilizing, one must try to move to a better position, or at least try to find aspects of the job that he/she likes and expend on them…

Another reproof I may face might arise from the type of the job I do; it is not exactly a high profile career, one may claim. Unlike full time teachers, I am not that much of an educator… I don’t have their grueling responsibility of seeing 200 students under their care learning and maturing. Mine is more of a job than a career as it does not develop into a whole process with a start and with end results. I don’t take students on a long path that brings them from ignorance to enlightenment …

Yet, I am a teacher, and as such, I am true to my career indicator - I will do it even if I am not paid to do it…

True, as a substitute teacher I don’t have the satisfaction of seeing the whole progression, but never the less I am still a teacher and an educator. I don’t envision my job as just a warm body in a classroom. I am an instructor whenever I have the opportunity to discuss an academic subject - literature, historical event, or a math problem, and I am a mentor when the occasion arises to discussing social issues, relationships, values or current events, thus making them teachable moments…

There is nothing more gratifying for a teacher than seeing the result of a teachable moment… Not very often, but occasionally, students that I had before, at the same school or even another, would remind me that they learned something from me that affected them. Those are what Mr. Sima, my teaching credentials professor, would call ‘psychological dollars’, worth, infinitely, much more than green dollars…