Skiffle: Have you tried academia ? It's hard graft but, apart from teaching commitments, you can work when you want. I quite enjoy it. Open University tutoring is another entertaining diversion. All the joys of teaching, the satisfaction of explaining to others but to well motivated students. Not the crowd control problems of school teaching which I haven't the patience for.

The problem with academia, is getting into it. I graduated with a 2:2 back in 198(*cough*) and have done sod all in my degree field since. Does an A level in English Lit and a few westerns in print qualify me to teach English or writing at the Open University ?
I did consider teaching and spent a summer term helping in a local primary school a year or so after graduation, but it wasn't for me.

> Does an A level in English Lit and a few westerns
> in print qualify me to teach English or writing at the Open
> University ?

Quite possibly. My mum did OU tutoring with only a BSc.
She wanted to go back to work part time after having us
kids and got in teaching first year undergrad stuff.

I had an MSc when I started tutoring for them.

You could always try your local OU centre (I guess there's
one in Sheffield, I know there is in Leeds). They sometimes
have other short term contracts as well, for example in maths
they'll do a 6 month study of using calculators in the classroom
to find out how effective it is and take on a couple of researchers
for that. (My dad did some of that kind of stuff for Leeds Uni after
he retired.)

[www.open.ac.uk]

thanx Jon, might look that up. It's got to be better than any job based around stats, reports, meetings and FILING !
Sorry for shouting but I do start to resent office work after a while (about three months), oweing to my (possibly immodest) belief that any adequetely trained monkey could could produce much the same results, and that I should be spending my time doing something no one else can.

Like writing. I could give another author a set of characters, a setting and a plot, and they'd still write a different book to the one I'd written.

Maddeningly, just after I got the ES job, I had to turn down an interview for a P/T job I'd rather fancied at the University. I've applied for dozens of jobs at the Uni and this was the first one I'd got an interview for. The interviewer e-mailed back and said how disappointed she'd been that I wasn't doing the interview, as I'd looked like the best candidate and I only lived around the corner.....

Don't thank me, thank Rob ..... we're easy to tell apart .... he's the one with the doctorate and I'm the one with two-and-a-half A Levels.



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I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

Sorry (must pay more attention)