Two things happened at work this week. It started feeling positive and pumped, and ended up completely fucked.

Tuesday was a board meeting and over 400 teachers showed up to picket and protest. You see, the federal government has removed the penalties for having large class sizes. For many years, the government would punish districts who had greater than 20 students in a classroom between Kindergarten and 3rd grade. But no more.

And so without penalties, the GUSD voted this week to eliminate the 20:1 ratio and take it up immediately to 30:1. That means for every 3 classrooms, there will now be one surplus teacher. In a district of 25,000 students, that means over 112 full time jobs cut. Not because it's better for students, not because it has research-based logic behind the move, but because it saves the district money.

What to do with those "surplus" teachers? Well, they get moved up if they can according to district seniority. So what? It means that any teacher with 4 years experience in the GUSD has more right to a job than I have, with 10 years experience. It means that on Friday I was told I am on the short list for a layoff. It means that my career took a huge hit this week and my mood took a corresponding dive.

Oh, there are policies in place to challenge the layoffs, there are rights I have as an employee with permanent status, I will be able to collect unemployment, etc. But I won't necessarily be working where I want to work. So that's the story.

I'll know more next Monday, in fact, on this very day next week I'll either be breathing a sigh of relief or I'll be wondering what the gods have in store for me that they would take me from this job onto the next adventure...