Those two things in the title are unrelated.
First up, this morning I received a message through Outschool, from someone who said they were a parent, but also affiliated with a private school in Texas. They said they had an emergency situation and were looking for a teacher to take the school’s final year high school class in optics and astronomy. For 8 hours a week, for six weeks. They said face to face was preferable, but they could do it by Zoom if necessary given my location.
They must have checked my Outschool profile, and possibly also my LinkedIn and academic publications, because this is well within my capabilities and experience. And honestly if it had been a school where I live in Sydney, I would have considered it. But Texas school hours are roughly midnight-6am here…. so that would be pretty terrible. (And there’s no way I’m travelling to Texas for this.) So I declined. I’d heard that there’s a shortage of teachers in some parts of the US, but I didn’t expect schools there to approach me!
While on Outschool, besides two ethics classes on Art today, I had another science lesson with the girl who has been doing those with me sporadically for a while. Today we went over the science of cloning, and applications of the technology. I cheated a little and used some of the material and slides I made for the ethics topic on cloning a couple of weeks ago, but I added more scientific explanations.
I did another 2.5k run today, backing up from yesterday. I did a good time yesterday after pushing myself, but today I decided to take it easier, and ran almost a full minute slower.
The other thing that happened today is the secret project I’ve been hinting at over the past several weeks has finally gone live! It’s a Darths & Droids related project, and if you haven’t noticed it already, you can find it linked from today’s new strip. If you look carefully…
There’s been a lot of work put into this, and I’m very excited that it’s now live. I’m waiting for the reader reactions to start rolling in as people discover it and start commenting about it.
Oh, and here’s Scully at the pizza place where we went for dinner last night.
(No, she didn’t get any of the pizza. We don’t feed her from the table.)
New content today:
Texas also has a Teachers’ Shortage problem? Weird, here the teachers’ union claims it’s a local problem that can be solved by raising the salary of the teachers to make the work more attractive – but if other countries have the same issues, it can’t be just the money. Weird…
I don’t know where “here” is for you, but in the States, salaries for teachers in most places are substantially lower than what one could make in private industry, or other government jobs for that matter.
Signed, made almost nothing as a teacher, now has no complaints about my pay from a big company.