Aspirations

As you may know, I am undereducated for the company I keep and the work that I do.  I have a BA and I had a teaching license for the state of California that expired when we moved from Sacramento to Santa Barbara.  I let it expire for a handful of reasons, the top reason being that my job transition went something like this:

July of 2007

• Plan pioneering graduation ceremony, scholarship and senior awards ceremony for first seniors of school
• Hold graduation ceremony on Friday
• Take group of students to Europe, leave on Sunday
• Return from trip on Tuesday of following week
• Start new job Wednesday (the next day) in Napa for a week 
• Pack up and clean our house to ready it for sale (ha!)
• Move to Santa Barbara

In there somewhere was me needing to get my license cleared and renewed.  It would have been a  good idea but starting a new job, moving out of the area, trying to sell our house, and having Steve start grad school all made the license bit seem unimportant.  And UNpossible.

Now after 5 years of national reform work, I look around and see that no only do I NOT have a teaching license, but most everyone I work with has an administrative license and Master's Degree. 

It is time for me to go back to school.  So I met with a woman at the Educational Leadership program at BYU and I got really excited about applying to their program for a Master's Degree in education.  Yay! 

It is also preparation for administrative license (Steve has proclaimed that me as a principal is "pretty much his biggest nightmare" so that part is less appealing to some members of the family) which will make me (pending getting in and being able to complete the program) eligible for the administrative job market right around the time Steve goes on the job market.

To be honest I have the perfect job.  I love the work I do, I have tremendous co-workers, and there is something invigorating and stirring about the national landscape in education that makes working in one school seem unappealing.  But the travel is hard as my children get older, so perhaps one day I can find a way to do both the local work and stay connected to national work, who knows?

For now, I am simply working to get accepted into this program and I have a couple of black holes in my application that is stressing me out:

1) I can't get the state of Utah to recognize my teaching background.  They said that five years in California is all fine and dandy but I have to prove I can teach here by getting a license here and teaching for a year.  I can imagine quitting work and moving to take on a leadership position in a community school or district, but taking Utah beginning teacher's salary?  I can't even fathom what that would be like.  So while I can still apply to the program at BYU, it makes me a less appealing candidate.

2) I bombed the math portion of the GRE.  I will admit I did not study aggressively given that I decided to take the test in December and had three weeks of prep time, including the 2 weeks my children were on break.  So focusing several minutes of my time on questions like "If B is the midsection between A and C, is AC and x>0, which of the following quantities is larger: x or ACDC?" was more than my poor pea brain could handle.  I scored somewhere around the 30th percentile, yikes!! That means 70% of the people who take that test outscore me.  Steve pointed out that I did help another person in there by bumping up their score by a small portion so that gives me some comfort at least.  I did get the 84% for verbal so I am hoping that they still let me in the program given that my ability to solve for x is pretty pathetic.

The deadline for application is February 15th, the day after I turn 37.  I hope that I don't get rejected too quickly so I can enjoy my late 30s as much as possible.  I have everything completed now other than a letter explaining why I don't have a license. 

Wish me luck!