Don't Worry About Your Inevitable Worrying. That Way, When You Worry, You Won't Worry So Much About It.

The status of the international economy, it seems, has affected my status as a member of the workforce, at least for the time being.

I say this because I am either at or quite near the top pay grade for a teacher in the state of Minnesota--I'm at an "MA + 60," which means a Master's Degree plus at least another sixty post-graduate academic credit hours. That being said, I was informed this past week that I will be out of work as of the end of this school year. At present, I teach Academic Reading to struggling high school-aged readers, which I can do with my existing English teaching certification if I am also in the process of acquiring a Reading teaching certification. (I am indeed in the process of acquiring that second certification.)

Yet it became clear to certain folks in the district in which I work that renewing my contract each semester during the year-long certification process would have been rather expensive in comparison to hiring a younger worker just out of his or her university experience and renewing his or her contract (while he or she finishes the Reading certification) over the same period of time.

Hence, the younger worker was hired, and I am being let go. This is clearly a blow from a personal monetary standpoint--which is a huge concern, obviously--but it also stings because I enjoy my job. (I'll bet that if I disliked my job, I'd have been offered it indefinitely--isn't that just the way of things?...)

I've got a job interview lined-up for later this week--this one for an English teaching position in the same district--so we'll see how that goes. Yet I can't help but think that my academic background is going to be a barrier to acquiring a long-term teaching position in Minnesota, given the status of the economy and the fact that in Minnesota a given district must by law pay teachers what their academic credentials demand--as well as what their teaching background demands. (Private schools can get around some of this, but they tend to pay considerably lower wages than publicly-financed schools--and their health care packages can be rickety in comparison, as well.) One can see, then, why in the state of Minnesota a law that is supposed to protect highly-qualified teachers' pay standards often encourages districts to pass-over those folks in favor of newly qualified teachers when the economy sags.

(At present, I'm in the odd position of waxing nostalgic regarding the fact that publicly-financed schools in England often ignored teachers' advanced degrees, which meant that they didn't necessarily pay teachers quite what they were "worth," but they didn't tend to shy away from hiring highly-qualified candidates, either. I had no problems getting jobs when I lived there, though the cost of living in England is on average far higher than it is in most of the U.S....)

At any rate, this scenario is not my fault and it is not the fault of the newly qualified teacher who will be taking over my position. It is also not the fault of the people who work in this district's Human Resources department, though I tend to dislike the unjustifiably inflated egos often displayed by human resource workers. (By the way, I say let's either call it "Personnel" again, or simply mothball the H.R. fleet. Who's with me?...)

At any rate, like a lot of people in this financially-unstable era, I've been worrying about things more often than I might normally do. This has prompted me to "create" a still-rough-around-the-edges philosophy of worrying in the last week or so--I put "create" in quotation marks because I know it's probably been said in various forms many times before, and therefore I'm not really the originator, as it were. Anyway, it goes like this (and, yes, I know that I lazily substituted "they" for "him or her," so try not to get worked-up about that):

1.) Don't tell someone who is worrying about something that they shouldn't worry about that thing, because then they'll worry about why you're dissuading them from worrying. It'll simply make things worse, at least in the short run.

2.) Similarly, don't tell them to "try" not to worry, because that's like telling someone to try not to think of the color red--it has the opposite effect from what one intends. So saying this is probably worse than saying #1, above.

3.) So I guess all you can do is acknowledge verbally that worrying is sometimes an inevitable part of life, and then follow this up by saying, "I've found a certain amount of personal success in not worrying so much about my inevitable worrying." That way, when they inevitably worry, it might not bother them quite as much as before.

Hey, that's probably a rather small victory, but in this worry-filled age, it might be an essential victory nonetheless.

At any rate, it seems to be working--a little bit--for me.