Telephone

My job normally does not involve very much time on the telephone.  On Friday, however, I had three pretty important phone calls:

• I spoke with a high school director from the other side of town who is interviewing Viola for a mid-year replacement position and told him how great she is as a teacher and colleague.  After we hung up, I emailed her to say I thought it went well, and she emailed back to say that she has just been offered a maternity leave position at another school with a very good reputation.  I’m not sure what she’ll do–she had already been in touch to say she was going on the market this year and would I write a letter for her file, but these two positions came up before the real hiring season.  The school I spoke with is much, much more convenient for her (as SA is not) and I think in her position, not absolutely needing to go back to work in January, I would probably hold out for that one and if that one didn’t happen, do the regular job search for a job to start in August.  But we’ll see.
• I also got a phone call from the IT director about a resource he’d gotten for us that the new AHS was asking about, and needed to talk him through what the AHS’s questions meant and reassure him that no one, least of all him, was in trouble.  The IT director is a good guy and highly capable, but he does sometimes see situations in an unexpected (to me) way and it often takes a lot of talking to construct some version of reality that we can both sign off on.
• And the most important phone call was from my friend MW, who is spending the semester in Paris with her family, to say that they had gone to bed early and she had woken up in the middle of the night to a bunch of worried emails from friends.

Today I finished and uploaded my sixteenth and final 2015 college recommendation letter, just a few weeks before some of the early decisions will start being released.  We have seven more school days until Thanksgiving break.  How on earth did that happen?

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