"Every Movie Has a Lesson" has been officially published!

As a now unemployed elementary school teacher, I've been hitting up CareerBuilder.com and Monster.com quite a bit this summer since becoming a budget cut casualty in May.  I've been searching high and low for a new teaching job, but knowing that there were 17,000 other riffed teachers out there in the state of Illinois, I've been very open to the real possibility that I may have to get a job outside of education.  I've applied for educational consulting, presenting, sales, and curriculum positions to go with the endless online teaching applications across the Chicagoland area.  I have also been prepared for the possibility of both unreliable substitute teaching and unemployment.  

Then a strange opportunity fell into my lap for a side job.  For any of you who know your way around job engines like CareerBuilder, you know that you get some loose job matches pertaining to your resume profile from time to time.  One from that site that came across my e-mailed job alert was for "Society/Culture Writers (part-time)" with Examiner.com.  It described how it was "seeking historians, educators, activists or others who are knowledgeable about society or a culture-related topic" for the Chicago, IL area.

At first, I didn't know what to think.  I thought my nitch movie reviews with life lessons would be too specific for what they were looking for with society and culture.  I also thought how my teacher resume and a zero work writing portfolio was going to get me a look if I even applied.

In any case, I loosely applied online.  I figured I'm going to write reviews anyway, I might as well try to get a little change for them.  I had no cover letter, but described my ancient high school and college newspaper history and my teaching since.  I attached a sample article (my review with lessons for Inception) and within 36 hours received a recruiter's e-mail offering me the role of "Frankfort Film Examiner" as part of The Chicago Examiner.

Today, I published my first article for Examiner.com Chicago, that review for Inception: 

Movie Review: Inception

While it's no Chicago Tribune, Rolling Stone, or Rotten Tomatoes.com and pays pennies, it's just cool to be published and to add another avenue of sharing my writing and reviews.  As one Facebook friend told me, Roger Ebert probably didn't start at the Sun-Times.  While I have zero expectations that this will ever pay the bills or become a real career, it's a fun new endeavor.

They would like me to post 3-5 articles per week there, which will expand what I review to include DVD releases of that week and vintage reviews of the lessons from older movies.  The site is based around subscribers and traffic-statistics, so please check out the page and submit your e-mail address as a subscriber:

http://www.examiner.com/x-62969-Frankfort-Film-Examiner

This will not keep me from writing here on this blog.  The "Every Movie Has a Lesson" blog allows for more columns and first person writing that the Examiner does not.

To all the readers of this blog, my Facebook friends, and old classmates, THANK YOU for visiting, reading, sharing this other friends, support, and well-wishes.  The reviews and the site aren't going anywhere, but the scope and audience may be getting a little bigger!