New job, yay!

    I somehow let a whole month go by without updating..tsk tsk.  To be fair, I had a lot going on.  I had to finish up my third semester of grad school, and I also started a new job, which is what we’ll focus on today, boys and girls.
    Yes indeed, I quit my minimum wage job at Dollar Tree and now make slightly above minimum wage as an Assistant Group Leader for the after school program run by the YMCA.  The Y has six programs, three in my town (which is where the Y is also located), two in an adjacent town, and one in a second adjacent town.  My program is run in the cafeteria and surrounding hallway of the middle school I myself attended from 1999-2002.  It’s the same building, only the caf has a garish mural of anime students eating assorted pieces of lunch.  I mean like a sandwich with no plate and no visible drink or even lunch box the sandwich presumably came from.  I don’t really remember, but I think the underneath coat of paint is the same color.  The most vivid memories I have are of when it was dimly lit, anyway (ie a dance).
    So in this program, there are somewhere in the vicinity of forty kids.  My group is made up of mostly kindergartners (the youngest students allowed in the program).  I have a first grader or two and a second grader also.  I’m glad I have them and not the older kids, though sometimes the simplicity of projects frustrates me, as does the fact that most of the kids need help with these projects.  But they’re so darn cute.
    What we basically do in the program is show up at two o’clock and start wheeling stuff from the “back room” to the caf.  The “back room” is just that - it’s a creepy hallway-looking thing in the back of the closest classroom to the caf, which happens to be a Special Ed room at the moment.  Most of the time there are students in the room, and they always seem to be dicking around.  To be fair, the bell rings at 2:15, but really?  I don’t recall having fifteen minutes at the end of the day to just sit around when I was in middle school.  But what do I know?
    So we wheel stuff out.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Every kid has a laundry basket with their name in it, and we line them all up along the walls.  These laundry baskets are stacked on these little things with wheels that come to about 6" high.  The name of them is escaping me right now and I’m going to feel really stupid when someone points it out.  They’re like skateboards, but square?  Whatever.  So we have those laundry baskets, and we have a small bookshelf with wheels, on which we also keep a mat and pillows, and that becomes the library corner.  Inside the baskets, we keep tri-fold posters, one of which has info parents might be interested in, one has lists of which kids are in which group accompanied by stars with teachers’ names (just not mine :( ), and a third one has anti-bullying messages on it.  We’ll soon have a fourth which will always be season-specific.  We also have a first aid kit (yes!), and a prize box for when kids are good.
    Speaking of, we have this awesome chart.  It’s blue at the top, then green, then yellow, then red.  Each kid’s name is on a clothespin that gets attached to green (or “ready to go”) to start out with.  If a kid is good, they stay on green.  If they’re super good, they go up to blue, or “outstanding.”  If they act up, they go on yellow, or “warning,” and if they keep being insufferable or else do something really bad, they go on red, or “parent contact.”  We have little charts with animals on them, and the kids get one crossed off for finishing the day on green and two crossed off for finishing on blue.  When the card is full, they get a prize from the prize box.  So far so good.
    We also have two fairly conspicuous chests in the caf.  One of these contains board games, Legos, a toy grocery store, and the like.  The other contains art supplies, from which we daily have to fill little containers with markers, colored pencils, and crayons to be put out at activity and arts and crafts tables.  Usually one of them needs glue sticks and scissors.
    The kids are bussed in from two elementary schools, and of course the junior high kids are already there.  Once the elementary kids are all there, we do circle, where we read a book or do an ice-breaker like activity, then discuss the projects we’ll be doing that day.  Then, the kids wash their hands and have snack.  The teachers get to have snack too, which is (usually) awesome.  We get these cute mini-milk cartons of either apple, fruit, or orange juice on any given day, and some sort of cracker/chip thing (like reduced fat Doritos, which we had today).  I don’t like OJ and so far the only snacks I haven’t like are the bagel (but I kind of already knew that) and the Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos (fucking spicy).
    After snack, we do some sort of physical activity, which thankfully for the time being no longer involves going outside.  Today we played a cool game with the younger kids where they sat in a circle and one sat in the middle.  That kid had their eyes closed while the others passed a key around behind their backs as music played.  When the music stopped, the kid in the middle opened their eyes and got two guesses as to who had the key.  Then, the person who had the key was in the middle.  It was pretty cool.  After the physical activity, the kids whose parents have filled out a contract saying they want their homework done at the program do their homework, and the others either go to the coloring table or the library corner (the older kids are doing other stuff, I only really interact with my group and the group right above them age-wise).
    Next, we do activities that reinforce what they’re learning in school (so I’m told).  I found some of the activities for December myself, on Pinterest and Google.  I really didn’t want to get a Pinterest, but whatever.  It’s for the greater good, I guess?  After activity time, they do arts and crafts, and if they really don’t want to do the craft, they can, again, color or go to the library corner.  Only this time, the game chest is also open, and they can use stuff from there.
    All the kids in the program have to be picked up by six, and there always have to be at least two teachers.  In the three weeks I’ve been here, the latest a kid got picked up was 6:10, which isn’t so bad.  All the stuff is cleaned up and put away by then.  Probably half the kids are gone by the time we get to arts and crafts, sometimes even by activity time.  So we just sort of pounce when kids wander away from a table, and put all the stuff on it away.  So when that little girl left, we could just throw on our coats and leave, too.
    The only sucky part about my job is that we’re open long on half days, and really long on vacation days.  We were open 11:30-6 the day before Thanksgiving, and 12:15-6 on the random half day they had last week.  During vacations and snow days, we’re open 7:30-6, and on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve we’re open 7:30-2.  Here’s hoping we don’t have any snow days this year.  Or we only have delays, because we don’t open for delays.  We do open early if school is dismissed for inclement weather, though.  Gross.  We’re also open in the summer, from 7:30-6.  It’s my understanding that you don’t have to work the full 10 ½ hours daily in the summer if you don’t want to, and I’m hoping I don’t have to do it over vacation either.  The other thing about “weird” days is that we’re not at the middle school.  For the day before Thanksgiving we were at the Y, and that’s where we’ll be Christmas and New Year’s Eve as well.  During vacations or on snow days, we’re at an elementary school in my town that also has a program.  That’s where the summer program will be, except for the last two weeks, which will be at the Y.
    The uniform for this job is pretty chill.  I have to wear black, navy, or khaki pants, close-toed shoes, and a Y t-shirt and nametag.  Hoodies are cool, any color of shoes is cool, my pink hair is cool, my tattoos are cool, my lip piercing is cool.  And, for the moment, I have no Y t-shirt (or nametag), so I get to wear my own clothes.  I’ve been putting a lot more effort into my appearance than I did at Dollar Tree.  I put on eye makeup every day (which is all I ever put on), and I’ve broken out my hair clip collection.  I’ve also been reveling in wearing funky earrings, because at Dollar Tree I wasn’t supposed to wear dangly earrings, so I usually just wore black and white studs.  The best part is, the kids love my earrings and hair clips.  There are a bunch of girls who run up to me and ask to see my earrings and hair clip.  If I can, I make my shirt match (because I’m just that good), and they get a kick out of it.
    I don’t really have any complaints about this job.  No to say I never will, but this is the life.  In two months, I’ll be promoted from Assistant Group Leader to Group Leader (which I suspect does not come with a raise, but what can ya do?), which is cool.  I’m hoping this experience will help when I start applying for jobs at day cares and pre-schools, and who knows, if a kindergarten classroom is looking for a teacher’s aid, maybe that, too.  The hours aren’t bad, two to six Monday-Friday, and I actually get to leave around five on Thursdays.  My first paycheck this past Friday was really exciting.  I got a lot more money than I did in Dollar Tree checks.  At Dollar Tree, I had between twelve and sixteen hours a week, and I’ll routinely have nineteen here, in addition to getting more money per hour.  But this whole getting-experience thing has kind of spurred me to maybe get my Associate’s in Child Care, and I think if I transfer the credits from the community college I went to before U Mass Lowell to a community college closer to home, I’d only have one field placement left, and if I can somehow make it okay for my field placement to be where I work (wherever that may be), I could get the degree in January (assuming I start this placement in September).  I might not even need to get it officially, since technically the MFA I’ll get in July will be a teaching degree.  And if I’m never head teacher (which I don’t want to be), schools might not care.  I would also have to check with this potential community college to see how intense their placements are, because the reason I didn’t complete the program at the other college was the intensity.  I don’t want to be a head teacher, and that program made you work like one, even though you couldn’t be one with an Associate’s degree.
    Back to the original subject.  I really like my new job, and I love my kids.  I just got a new one today, he transferred from the next group up because I had a twelve year old Autistic girl in my group (by her choice), and she decided she wanted to be in a different group.  Why, I’m not sure.  But I adored this kid before he was in my group, and he made my day by telling me he was happy to be in my group (which is called the Bumblebees).  I feel like I’m doing something good, and I’m making a difference in these kids’ lives.  Not like a real teacher, of course, but it’s cool to think I’ll be remembered fondly (though also probably vaguely) when these kids are older.  This is in stark contrast to pretty much every job I’ve ever had, especially Dollar Tree.  I was constantly stressing about customers and the schedule was always put out later than it was supposed to be, and definitely later than it should have been.  It’s also very different from the few weeks I had no job (because this job didn’t start as early as I thought it would), where I was worrying that they wouldn’t call me after all.  I haven’t really felt stressed about this, except in preparation for the day before Thanksgiving, which didn’t turn out as bad as I thought it would.  The only thing I have to do now is learn how to buckle the fuck down so I get everything done that I need to get done this upcoming semester.