More on the job issue-- I'd been trying to find a full-time teaching job for over two years before I got this one at a private school (2 1/2 weeks before school started mind you). I was so excited to finally get an actual career-type job. I've worked in an office (dreadful experience), as a check-out girl at Homegoods, JC Penney, Rite Aid, as a substitute teacher and as a very part-time tutor at Sylvan Learning Center (like 2 three hour nights a week), and I was SICK to DEATH of crappy jobs. I knew that teaching was my "calling" if you will. So enter this Catholic school teaching job (mind you, I'm far from Catholic but now I know rosaries and prayers and I can tell you how a mass is held in my sleep). I feel as though the religion part I can deal with (I mean who am I to interfere with a parent's wish for their child's education as far as religion goes), but this has got to be the most sexist experience I have ever encountered in my life. And everyone seems a blind eye to it! Not to mention the fact that I'm getting paid about 10 grand less than if I were at a public school. Sigh.
Everything is boys school boys school boys school (the schools are split up-- hence girls school and boys school). The priests rarely if ever make a visit over to the girls school except for daily communion and then they high-tail it out of there. The boys (nor the boys school administrators) respect women at all-- including the women teachers (like me) who have to teach over there for certain classes, and the one lone teacher who has to teach over there all the time. Who was told, I might add, when she was hired that they wanted a man for the job but couldn't find one qualified enough. Isn't that illegal? She says they never go out of their way to make her feel confortable and RARELY even say a word to her. I absolutely DREAD the 8 times I have to go over there and teach a week. The girls school I love. And it's not that I hate boys-- I loved subbing at the middle school level in the public school I worked at. I just feel so frustrated and there's nowhere to turn except the other teachers who pretty much just say, "Yep that's the way it is."
So, to sum it up, it almost makes me feel as though I'm kind of working backward starting a knitting group at the girls school. Is that crazy and sexist of me? I feel guilty feeling that way, but it is kind of a "girly" thing to do.
On the knitting front, I'm working on a stockingette roll-hat in the round out of Merino Wool I picked up at the Henry Ford Museum gift shop of all places, and just got Stitch in Bitch courtesy of the postal carrier who just showed up!