Curriculum Vitae
cur·ric·u·lum vi·tae
noun
- a brief account of a person's education, qualifications, and previous experience, typically sent with a job application.
For years I worked as a writer for a very small audience. I mean the audience members themselves were small. I taught in an elementary school for seventeen years and every Monday morning after they said their good mornings, hung up their coats and sharpened their pencils we’d all settle in and write about our weekend. Then the brave ones would share their experiences with the class. My job was to coach, encourage, sometimes to console, but my most important task was to listen.
After all of the brave volunteers were done I’d read from my journal. Since the first job of a writer is to know your audience I kept the language simple. I shared stories about my wife and our weekend adventures. After months of working and sharing my teaching partner would joke that the students were starting to sound just like me. Even kids who rarely spoke in class began to share their work. They’d found their voice.
After nearly two decades of service working as an elementary school teacher with the Milwaukee Public Schools I resigned last fall. The average teacher in an urban district lasts about five years before they run out kicking and screaming. I made it three times that long before it became obvious that I needed a change.
The challenge I’m facing now is what to do next. I’ve cultivated a skill set that I think is applicable almost anywhere but still I’m stalling. I’m excited about trying something new but I have no idea where to start. Priority one when I got out of MPS was to Frankenstein together a new and improved resume. Realizing I’d rather be stabbed than go back into teaching I knew I’d have to reinvent myself but it hasn’t worked so far. I tried posting my new resume on Monster, Indeed and other sites but they’ve kept offering me more teaching jobs. It’s as if even the software was still seeing me with chalk in my hand and tempera paint on my pants. I’ve tried to distance myself from the moniker teacher but it has stuck to me like gum on the underside of a desk.
I’ve done other things. Teaching doesn’t define me – at least not anymore. I tell myself that I’m more than just my last job but then I check my email and Monster sends me another list of jobs reminding me of who I have been for a very long time. Below is a list of the jobs I’ve held over the years. I’m proud of the work I’ve done even if the jobs themselves don’t exactly reflect a roadmap to inevitable success. We do what we have to.
- Cook/asst. manager: Meteoric rise from lowly pizza cook to assistant manager for Ned’s Pizza on Milwaukee’s north side within months after graduation. Highlight: Starred in a tv commercial and acted as the unofficial mascot just like the “pizza, pizza” guy from Little Caesar’s. Okay, so the only part of me that actually appeared on the commercial was my left forearm sliding a pizza into the oven but technically since I was the only employee shown I’m sticking with my story of being the star. If you lived in Milwaukee in the summer of 1985 and watched channel 18 you might remember the arm. The fame never went to my head.
- Cook/asst. manager: Successfully survived an armed robbery while working at Little Caesar’s.
- Maintenance man/laborer: Washed semi trucks, loaded salters, mopped floors and cleaned toilets for a trucking company my freshman year of college. It was not glamorous but it was on the bus line and they worked around my school schedule. Highlight: I’ve got the stereo in this truck blasting loudly enough to drown out the howl of the shop vac I’m using to clean out the cab when I have an odd sensation: movement. I look up just in time to see the truck lurch forward and knock over a step ladder which punctures the radiator as I slowly roll out of the garage toward the street. I slam on the brake. Just then I see the owner running toward me yelling loudly enough to be heard over both the blaring stereo and the shop vac. It turns out that the driver only set the parking brake and left the truck in neutral. A big no, no. I must have accidentally bumped the button and released the brake. Hearing this, the owner actually apologized to me and turned his wrath on the driver. It wasn’t pretty. Since I applied the brake to a moving big rig technically you could say that I was a semi truck operator – briefly. I’m adding it to my cv.
- Landscaper: If you owned a large home in River Hills, Whitefish Bay or Bayside in the 1980s or early 1990s chances are I may have mowed your lawn, weed wacked your weeds or raked your leaves. You’re welcome.
- Telemarketer: Have you ever gotten in trouble for impersonating a police officer? Me either. I got paid to do it – sort of. I worked for a telemarketing company soliciting money for the POAN: The Police Officers Association of Nebraska. Yes, Nebraska. We weren’t allowed to actually say that we were police officers but we were encouraged to use authoritative voices when asking people to donate money to the association’s death benefit fund. Sound a little fishy to you? It ate away at me. I needed the money and there was a whole office full of other hungry broke college kids and officer training school dropouts doing the same job but it didn’t feel right. So I did a little detective work. I called the Police Association of Nebraska and told them what was going on. The public relations person there offered me a little primer on telemarketing. The police certainly don’t have the time to solicit donations. Their job is to chase bad guys and keep the peace. Instead they hire companies like the one I worked for to do the soliciting for them. The company receives a large percentage of the donations and the association gets the rest. It still felt a little creepy profiting from the generosity of people who in most cases didn’t have the money to give but it wasn’t a scam. My company had a contract with the POAN. I felt a little better. I didn’t have to like it but at least I wasn’t doing anything illegal.
The day after I called the POAN I had to work. Within minutes my boss called me into his office. He did not look pleased. He found out about the call. Sure enough he said he received a phone call from someone with the POAN who told him I called asking questions. I admitted to making the call and he went off on me. Who did I think I was to accuse him of being a crook, a thief, a con artist? He paused in his rant for a moment to catch his breath and I said I wasn’t calling about him, I was calling about me. I couldn’t in good conscience continue to ask people to give me their hard earned money if it was a scam. And I was getting a commission based on the size of the donation. The more they gave the more I got. And all for a death benefit fund for Nebraska? How many cops have gotten shot in Nebraska? I told him I called because I’m not a crook, a thief or a con artist. He sat down. We must have talked in his office for an hour. He told me he owned and managed Advanced Communications for years and had never had anyone even question him before. Everybody just took the money. I only worked there for a little while longer after the day the boss crapsploded on me. I don’t know if it was all of the coffee I drank there to stay awake or if it was the nagging feeling that even if it was legal it wasn’t quite right. I just didn’t have the stomach to play a cop anymore.
- Furniture mover: Worked for Hernia Movers for a few months. Their motto was “The Potentate of Totin’ Freight.” I loved the name and the motto but hated the job. They worked me like a rented mule. I still remember one of the full-timers referred to us part-timers as “college pukes.” I only got into college because my father died when I was a minor and I saved my survivor benefits. I took the bus to the university every day and to my job after classes. I’d done more shitty jobs than he could possibly have understood but how do you respond to a guy who could carry appliances singlehandedly without a dolly? I worked until my forearms cramped.
- Sweatshop: Promoted from silk screen printer to team leader within weeks of working in a sweatshop (sorry, it was a custom silk screen printing manufacturer). Essentially I was responsible for coordinating print jobs between the sales department, the ink mixer, the materials handlers and the printers. I worked with people from all around the world: Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, India, Vietnam, etc. and developed a lifelong respect for the hard working immigrants who do the jobs the rest of us don’t want to do.
- Production asst./Second shift manager: Second brush with fame. During the first Gulf War I helped make flags. One day a local news crew came to film at the factory. I ran a machine that cut the flags from a huge roll. The reporter helped me run the machine, but when the segment appeared on tv the flags weren’t the only things cut: He cut me out of the report.
- Completed B.A in history in spring of 1993
- Manager for a music publishing company: Worked for six years as the receiving manager for a music publishing company while putting myself through graduate school. I took one class per semester for four years along with working full-time. It was no joke it was work. I’ve done a lot of crappy jobs but this was not one of them. I was in charge of everything that came in and out of the building from bulk mailings to semi-truck sized shipments. I was also in charge of all order filling and building and grounds maintenance. The owners practically adopted me. Once again I’d found a company that worked around my school schedule. I was given extra hours on evenings and weekends for side projects when I had the time. Thanks to the good people at Schaum Publications I finished my M.A completely debt free.
Completed M.A in spring of 1999
- MPS here I come: Summer 1999 resigned from publishing company and enrolled in MTEC: Milwaukee Teacher Education Center for summer school training and one year thirty-nine credit internship with the Milwaukee Public Schools.
- Classroom teacher seventeen years. After three weeks of training in summer school I was thrown into the deep end: a fifth grade classroom as a full-time teacher sans water wings. It was the ultimate example of sink or swim. I swam. Classroom teaching is a lot like jazz. It’s improvisational performance art. You can plan and prepare for hours but nothing prepares you for working with children. I have an older brother who is an army veteran. He’s fond of saying “everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” In an elementary school classroom it’s more like, “everybody’s got a plan until some kid projectile vomits all over your classroom.”
It’s hard to even describe all the hats I wore during my years teaching. I coached volleyball, helped lead a two day camping trip, rewrote the children’s book “Jumanji” into a play. My students acted, created full sets with background , props, light and sound effects. In other years we built volcanoes that spewed smoke using my wife’s Halloween fog machine, built a model of Yellowstone with flowing water using a pump from our fish tank, and brought wading pools and ice sheets in to demonstrate the movement of glaciers. For our seven summits unit we studied the world’s highest peaks. We had two mountain climbers visit our classroom on their way to climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. The climbers actually sent us a photo from the summit of them holding a poster our students created. That photo appeared on the front page of the MPS website. More recently we constructed twelve foot totem poles for our Native American project along with tipis and a wigwam made out of real birch bark. In fact our entire exhibit was scheduled to be displayed at the Arts @ Large Gallery on Fifth Street in Milwaukee with the help of Kid Curators.
- Highlight – for years my work week would end with a story. On most Friday afternoons toward the end of the day I’d sit my students down on the floor in front of me and share a tall tale, folktale or fable. I’d accumulated dozens of stories from around the world and morphed them into the ongoing saga of an unlikely hero named Jack. Everyone’s heard of the story “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Well, my Jack could beat that Jack’s ass. He was born into a poor Appalachian family. He was small but smart and somehow despite the odds being against him our hero always won. He’d outsmart a king, marry a princess, slay a dragon or defeat a giant. As the week’s installment reached its crescendo I’d say, “and do you know what happened next? Twenty some odd munchkins would stare at me in earnest wonder. “You’ll have to wait until next week!”
I used to write for a very small audience and I was pretty good at it. When you write for kids it pays to have a self deprecating sense of humor. But there’s a difference between playing the fool and being one. My goal here has been to describe myself and my experience authentically using a voice honed over years of working in a classroom. But while I’ve poked fun at my own work experience I hope that a deeper message came through. Integrity and tenacity, intelligence and strength. As a classroom teacher I spend much of my day trying to get small so I could meet the children in my care on their level and I got pretty good at that too. My audience has changed. My writing voice just hasn’t caught up yet. So where do I begin?
John Hagen
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