Look, Ma, I'm an Intervention Specialist

It has been quite some time since I last posted, and many things have happened in my life that have caused this. I shall chronicle these things eventually in future posts, but I need to report on a significant change in my teaching activities. After a lengthy hiatus since last May, I decided that I was weary of trying to babysit classes of high school students who had little interest in learning anything, but a major interest in trying to play games on their substitute teacher. I decided to become what is known as an "intervention specialist." What this means is that I wanted to follow just one or two students around all day and try to teach them their lessons, leaving classroom discipline and most administrative matters to a teacher-in-charge at whatever classroom I found myself in.

I had heard that the school district needed "intervention specialists," so I decided to apply for the job.

The application process itself reveals a lot about the central administration of our school department. For instance, I attended a job fair where people could apply to be an intervention specialist -- there were only about six of us interested. There I was interviewed. Following the interview, I was accompanied by the head of the department herself, a very capable and overworked woman who must put in about 14 hours a day at her job. She stated that she wanted me to set up an appointment to be fingerprinted.

Mind you, I had already been fingerprinted by this school department. Believe me, that's another saga, too. I must check to see if I have already described that early in this blog. If not, I will get to it.

At any rate, I spoke to a young lady sitting behind a table who was supposed to be making appointments for fingerprinting. Two feet from her face, as she told me the date and the time, I wrote this information down right in front of her, repeating it verbally. The appointment was for about five days later.

When I arrived five days later in the morning to be fingerprinted, the folks in that office seemed mystified. "Oh, no, we don't do fingerprinting today. We'll set you up with an appointment in about two weeks." OK, wasted trip. Typical of that office in the school department. (I had had to be fingerprinted three times when I first applied to be a substitute teacher because the first two times they lost my fingerprints.) So finally I went down on the new appointed date and time and got fingerprinted.

In this room there seem to be two piles of folders or perhaps two filing cabinets, one each for these two different uses. One is for substitute teachers. The other is for intervention specialists. You would think that when one's fingerprints have been taken for one job,m and since they know you very well by name when they see you, that the workers in this room could make a copy of the fingerprints they already have of you that sit in one filing cabinet and carry this copy across the room and place the copy in the other filing cabinet.

But this is not possible. Another set of fingerprints must be taken. And these in turn must be processed by whoever processes them in the department and in Sacramento. Need I say that the duplication of effort is pointless and wasteful of the school department's already limited funds ?

And so I was fingerprinted and all my paperwork was put into a folder to be "processed."

Almost two months to the day, nothing had happened. I had visited the office about five weeks into this time period and was told that there was a slowdown because many of the staff members had been out "on training" and that when they got back to the office this meant that they had time to work on only two or three people's files. Then came Christmas and New Years, probably a dead period in which nobody in their office did much anyway.

So two months after being fingerprinted, I stopped by their office again to inquire about the situation. I was recognized immediately the lady at the desk nearest the counter reached over immediately to a pile of about half a dozen file folders, found mine (I think she knew exactly where it was), and began looking at it. I had to wait around for perhaps three-quarters of an hour while she entered various information from the folder into her computer, but at the end of that time I was handed an official permission to work as an intervention specialist.

Suddenly, I had become one. But I bet it would have taken another month or two to happen had I not stopped by and by my presence forced the issue.