Sharing out the eggs...

As my time at my practice school comes to an end (with the semester following soon after), a lot of the students are asking me if I will come back next year to teach. As much as I would love to go back to that school as a teacher, its a school that is renowned for innovative approaches and staff support (especially within the English department) and therefore has a relatively low turnover. To boot, I am a beginning teacher and can therefore not work as heavy a class load as a fully registered teacher - if they have a fully registered teacher and myself applying for a vacancy, it's likely I would lose out.

There are two other schools that I would love to work at within a 20k radius of home - looking at both school's websites, reading their ERO reports (the official Ministry of Education discussions) and speaking to previous attendees of the schools... problem with those schools? They're also renowned as fairly awesome. I can't put all my eggs into one or even three baskets or I may see out 2009 without getting a job - and that would make me a sad panda.

So I've worked on a creating a tier system of schools - it currently stands at ten schools:

Tier 1 - Dream College(DC)

Tier 2 - Awesome Rural High (ARH), Awesome College Near Mall (ACNM)

Tier 3 - Fairly Awesome Rural High (FARH), Fairly Awesome High Near Water (FAHNW), Fairly Awesome Landlocked High (FALH)

Tier 4 - Strict Private College (SPC), College Nearest Home (CNH), Alma Mater (AM), Good College Bad Commute (GCBC)

My current thoughts are to send out expressions of interest to Tiers 1, 2 and 3 but keep my eyes open for advertised jobs at Tier 4 schools. It's a way of keeping my fingers in all the pies... the worst thing would be to leave all this too late and be scurrying for jobs that I don't really want. I'll be spending the next couple of weeks collating references etc together and polishing up my CV and crafting cover letters (as well as you know, plan and teach and work and study) - the early bird catches the worm!

Are you dividing your eggs between multiple baskets? Let me know in the comments!