SUMMER WORK

Good news to report! Just this past Thursday I got a call from California State University - Long Beach (or "Cal State Long Beach") offering me a position teaching ESL in their American Language Institute this summer. Beginning, in fact, this coming Tuesday and going on for 12 weeks! (This job comes with no health or benefits, but it is $36 an hour for the hours I'm actually in class.)

In an earlier posting, I mentioned that I had seeded local ESL programs with my CV the past few weeks in hopes of some part-time ESL teaching this summer. Last week, I had begun to think the window of opportunity had passed, when the Cal State call came in. It's always a shot in the arm to be wanted by some program, even if it's not for my long-term career. Long Beach was one of the two schools on my A-list, both California state colleges. And it could perhaps work into some other postion at the same university more in line with what I'm looking for in instructional design, or even a position as an ESL professor in the Linguistics program, so it's definitely a foot in the door and will give me lots of credibility in job hunting in California. (If Cal State Long Beach saw fit to hire me, then I must be OK!)

There's also been some communication with my UCLA contact about part-time work in his govt. grant project cataloguing Arabic teaching materials as one of the many languages the project is working on for their database! That would not only get me a foot in the door in the state university system, but in the University of California (UC) system, which is one of the most presitigious in the country (UCLA and Berekely are two of the best known campuses). Don't want to count my chickens before they hatch, but it's promising, and there's no question that Prof. Hinnebusch would like me in the project! That's real enough.

Anyway, great news all round -- news that will shape my life now through mid August ...