You've got to be KIDDING me!

So, I decided to jump on another assignment one of you wonderful commenters had thrown at me...  I thought it would be a great idea to apply for a substitute teaching job now that I've settled in to my new home.  After all, I've worked in a school district office before and had seen first-hand the lack of suitable subs in that particular district.  In fact, out of grave necessity for warm bodies to fill in for absent teachers, the state of New Hampshire lowered the education requirements for substitute teachers while I was working at the district office.  They only needed candidates to have successfully graduated high school in order to sub.  No college, no degree, no teaching certificate needed.  I learned a powerful lesson a couple of days ago...  New Hampshire and Georgia are vastly different places. Duh, right?

I looked online at local counties' school district websites only to run into the same thing, over and over again: the position of substitute teacher was indefinitely closed to new applicants.  To be very honest, I was a little indignant.  I mean, being a teacher in a public school in Atlanta must be less than ideal (compared to genteel teaching appointments at, say, Phillips Exeter Academy), so being a SUBSTITUTE teacher at an inner city Atlanta school must be like combat duty.  I'm not saying that I think the kids are engaged in active war with the teachers, but having worked in a middle school in New York City, I know that kids plus crowding plus overworked teachers plus lack of funding equals chaos.  I was actually willing to volunteer to deal with the chaos.  In fact, I kind of looked forward to it.  Despite the discipline-issue kids I worked with in New York, I really loved my job.  The kids were the kind of kids that could very well turn out to be exceptional, given space and time and attention, all of which were in short supply in the tiny school that housed them.  When I was at the school, I saw what I had previously thought was only an urban teaching legend: a classroom for 14 students in what had formerly been a janitor's closet.  There were four thousand children in a building the size of my old elementary school.  Keep in mind, my old elementary school was in a town with a population under one thousand.  Going down the hallways of this middle school during class changeover was like trying to get onboard a Tokyo subway at rush hour.  

The long and short of this is, I won't be substitute teaching any time soon.  Atlanta area schools are not hiring those of us willing to go once more into the breach, so us idealists and part-time job searchers had better look elsewhere.  Which leads me to another blow...

When I look for work in between acting and teaching gigs, I always turn to temp agencies.  I've been a Kelly Girl in at least three states now and have always loved the familiarity of the temp agency routine.  Every time I applied at a temp agency, I had a job to go to the very next day.  I anticipated the same thing or something similar to happen now.  No f'in chance.  Not only is Atlanta not looking for substitute teachers, it happens to be in the middle of a wave of massive joblessness, so there are no temp positions and very few permanent positions to be had.  Damn.  I picked the WRONG DAMN TIME to graduate from grad school.

So, folks, what do I look for now?