On booby prizes and new horizons
Friday, August 8, 2014 at 05:40AM booby prize noun : a prize that is given as a joke to the person who finishes last in a competition M-W.com
Don't mistake the edge of a rut for the horizon.
~ James Patterson
25 years ago I was returning from teaching overseas and decided I wanted a job in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. After a late start in job hunting and a couple snags getting a Minnesota teaching license, the "big" schools had their library positions filled.
As chance would have it, the St. Peter, MN, schools had a librarian's job open up late in the summer. And since they would be building an addition to their high school that included a new media center, they were so desperate to fill the position they hired me. With a family to feed, I accepted this booby prize - another small school, small town position, 75 miles from the bright lights of the big city. Until something better turned up, anyway.
While I enjoyed teaching in St. Peter and helped design a great library, I still applied for library supervisor jobs in the Cities. Without success. In the meantime, I moved into a house on a lake, started teaching as an adjunct for the local state university, and made friends. So when an "audio-visual supervisor" job opened in the Mankato schools in 1991, I applied for it even though it was 15 miles further away from my dream of living in Minneapolis.
It turned out that the Mankato job was interesting and rewarding and I was pretty good at it. The audio visual supervisor eventually became the technology director as computers and networks and the Internet entered the schools and became critical to daily operations. The town of Mankato was growing and the monthly trip to the metro area to visit Target and Barnes & Noble became unnecessary when those chains opened here. I became active in Kiwanis and the YMCA and helped the local United Way raise money. Mankato became my son's "hometown" with him having only vague memories of ever living anywhere else. Bike trails flourished. It got easier and easier to be proud of being from Mankato.
I applied and was offered a few other professional jobs over the years, but when I told the family about moving to Wisconsin or Missouri or whereever, they'd go into melt-down. So finally I promised my son that I would stay in the Mankato area until he finished school and I would stop looking for other jobs.
Thus 25 years later I'm still here.
On retrospect the booby prize turned out to be the grand prize. The Mankato Area and its schools have been a wonderful place to live and raise a family. I could not have asked for a more rewarding career - both a day job that never got boring and an employer that gave me the flexibility to be a writer and conference speaker on the side. I have had incredible superintendents to work for, always supportive school boards, and top-notch coworkers. I often wonder what would happen if I ever had to supervise a person who actually needed supervision!
But I am moving on. I have accepted a technology director position for the suburban Burnsville-Eagan-Savage (MN) School district that will start in a couple weeks. The last question I was asked during the interview process was simply "Why do you want a new job when you already have a great situation where you are?" It was the exact question I had been asking myself since I hesitantly sent in my resume.
While there are several reasons for the move, what it really comes down to is this: I want a job that will challenge me in new ways. Simple as that. I want the work of moving mountains, not just doing landscaping until I retire. New eyes on technology will be good for Mankato's kids; and I hope my experience will be good for Burnsville's students.
And I want to see if big city life is all I've dreamt it to be.
Wish me luck. I'll need it!
