N.C. Teaching Fellows competing for fewer jobs

Today, Elizabeth Harwell begins her first day of school teaching math to 7th graders at Hawfields Middle School in Mebane.

But just last week, the 2009 graduate of the UNC Teaching Fellows program didn’t  have a job lined up for the year.

Harwell was hired late because many counties did not hire teachers until the state budget was passed in August. Without knowing the final budget, schools didn’t know how hard they would be hit by the cuts and whether they would have money to hire new teachers.

Open all doors inwards

I've been in Granada for about a week and a half now, and it's felt like a vacation more than anything. This weekend I finally had an epiphany that I'm actually not going anywhere. I will be living here for the next four months. This thought is mostly wonderfully exciting, but also a tiny bit terrifying.

I can find my way around some of this incredibly beautiful city now, and I’m feeling more and more at home. But even as I start to feel comfortable, there are lots of little differences that consistently remind me that I'm in a foreign country. Here are a few.

Getting through customs in Spain

I'm finally in Spain! I got here on Thursday, but I already feel like I've been out of the country for about a million years.

When I arrived I was already in a bleary half-awake state, due to not having slept for about 36 hours, and having to go through immigration and customs and find my hotel all in Spanish seemed like a near impossible task. Luckily for me, though, immigration and customs involved minimal effort in Spain.

Off to Spain

Hola! My name's Caroline Phillips and I'm a junior at UNC. I'll be spending the fall semester studying abroad in Granada, Spain.
 
Granada is a comparatively small city, about the size of Greensboro, in the province of Andalucia in southern Spain. It's about an hour from the southern coast, and it's also at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
  SEP 8