“9:00 appointments. It’s time for 9:00 appointments. Proceed to the gym if you have a 9:00 appointment. ”
I joined the crowd of professionally dressed college students rushing down the hall to the gym. The crowd was nervously straightening skits and blazers as they tried to smile at classmates while sizing up the competition moving down the hall with them. It was ACCK’s [Associated Colleges of Central Kansas which Bethel is a part of] annual Teacher Interview Day.
We were told that registration for Teacher Interview Day would open on a certain day at 5:00pm. I made sure I was home early that day, sitting in front of my computer, and logged onto the website at 5:00 sharp (registration didn’t open until 5:02 according to the clock in my kitchen and on my computer by the way). I had already looked through the list of school districts that would be at the event to see who I would be interested in meeting with. In class we were told to sign up for as many interviews as possible in order to get our names out and gain experience interviewing. I decided that 9 interviews would really be enough for me even though we could sign up for more.
I quickly selected the districts I was interested in visiting with and hit “submit”. This generated a schedule for me, but I noticed that I didn’t have an interview scheduled with every district I had selected! I had to log back in to try again, and this time some of those districts had huge holes in the time selection options. There were evidently several other people scheduling interviews at the same time and they were taking my time slots!!! Arrg!!!! I had to repeat this process of submitting, then logging back in and selecting interview times for about 10 minutes until I finally had interviews with all the districts I wanted. By the time that was all over I was worn out!
Obviously this didn’t clue me in to the craziness of Teacher Interview Day because I once again felt overwhelmed when I got there. Each district representative was set up at a table in the gym at Bethany College (the ACCK schools take turns hosting the event). You had 25 minutes to walk into the gym, find the correct table, interview and then get out of the gym. There was a 5-minute break, and then the crowd would rush back in for the next interview. I found that the interview sessions certainly went by quickly, and that each interview was different.
I had an interview with the small, Western Kansas district whose representative seemed so honest and open about the situation in the district and town (in terms of housing options, jobs nearby, etc.). I could see myself loving working for him and his district. There was the interviewer who kept telling me “good answer” (that made me feel better about myself), the interviewer who sat back in his chair and started drawing geometric shapes on my resume while I was answering my questions, the one who was telling me what to do during an interview rather than really interviewing me (this was after I had just been through 6 interviews in one day), and finally the interviewer who was typing all my answers into some form and kept having computer trouble (I really felt sorry for her!). When it was all said and done, it was quite the experience, definitely a good one, but still much crazier than I was expecting.
For more on ACCK see https://www.acck.edu/ics