Is It Inappropriate to Call About a Teaching Job Interview After the Principal Emailed? A Veteran Teacher Explains
Last Tuesday, I was scraping burnt oatmeal off my 7-year-old’s cereal bowl when my phone buzzed. It was Lila, who student taught with me two years ago, text typed in a flurry: “Principal Garcia emailed me yesterday to confirm my 4th grade opening interview next week. I want to call her to ask if I can bring my physical student work portfolio in person instead of just relying on the attachment I sent. Is that super inappropriate? Am I going to ruin my chances before I even walk in the door?”
I remembered being in her exact spot 12 years ago, right after I got my teaching degree. I’d applied for a 2nd grade spot at a small elementary school 45 minutes from my apartment, and the principal emailed me to confirm my 9 a.m. interview. I didn’t drive back then, and the only parking info on the website was for staff, so I wanted to call to ask if there was a visitor spot close to the front office I could use. I sat on my lumpy couch for an hour, staring at my flip phone, convinced calling would mark me as pushy, rude, too much. My cat kept tangling herself in the phone cord, and I ended up just sending a short email that I never got a reply to before interview day. I walked 15 minutes in a light April rain, showed up 10 minutes late with soaked socks, and spent the whole interview worrying I’d already messed up.
I’ve worked with six different principals in my 10 years of teaching, sat on three hiring committees, so I’ve seen every version of this play out. Lila told me her college career advisor had hammered into her that all communication with admin had to be over email, that calling was unprofessional and intrusive. That’s the common advice, right? But it’s not that black and white. I actually talked about this exact question with our current principal, Mia, at the back-to-school cookout last month. We were standing off to the side of the grill, waiting for our kids to finish fighting over a popsicle, when I brought it up. She laughed and said she gets this question all the time from new admin, too. “I don’t care if you call,” she said. “I get 75 applications for every opening. I’d much rather you ask one quick question up front than show up unprepared or wonder for three days. The only bad calls are the ones that waste my time.”
What counts as wasting time, I asked? She gave the example from last year, a candidate who called three times in one day to check if she’d received his resume, left a rambling two-minute voicemail every time. That’s the kind of call that gets you marked as high-maintenance before you even interview. But that’s not the same as a one-time, 90-second call about a specific, relevant question that can’t wait for a 48-hour email reply.
I broke this down for Lila, with the concrete rules I’ve picked up over the years. First, always check the original email the principal sent. If it says “all questions must be submitted via email” or “please do not call the main office for interview updates,” you don’t call. That’s a clear boundary, and you respect it. If there’s no such rule, ask yourself one thing: is my question answered somewhere already? If the interview time and address are right there in the email, or on the district job page, don’t call to ask it again. If your question is specific, new, and affects how you’ll prepare for the interview, a quick call is totally fine.
I even gave her the script I’ve told other new teachers to use, the one that keeps it short and polite: “Hi Principal [Last Name], this is [Your Full Name], calling about the [Grade/Position] interview next [Day]. I just have one quick question, and I totally understand if you prefer email, I just wanted to get a quick answer. [State your question here.] Thank you so much for your time, I really appreciate it.” That’s it, no extra fluff, no rambling about how excited you are, just what you need. If they don’t answer, leave that exact script as a voicemail and don’t call back. If they don’t reply, it’s fine to send a follow-up email after 24 hours.
Lila decided to go for it. She called, got Principal Garcia’s voicemail, left that exact script, and got a call back within an hour saying she’d love to see the physical portfolio. Lila had her interview last week, and texted me that the principal spent 10 minutes flipping through her student work samples, talking about how rarely candidates bring physical examples of their teaching. It went way better than she expected.
I still have teacher friends who swear calling is always inappropriate, that it’s better to just wait for an email reply no matter what. If that’s what you’re comfortable with, that’s totally fine. This isn’t a rule that says you have to call to get the job. It’s just that calling isn’t automatically inappropriate, like a lot of people will tell you. The big mistake people make isn’t picking up the phone—it’s not being thoughtful about how they use it.
Lila’s still waiting to hear back, and she’s still a nervous mess, which is how all job interviews go. I told her this week that even if she doesn’t get this spot, she didn’t mess anything up by making that call. She asked for what she needed to put her best foot forward, and that’s never a bad thing. I still think about that rainy day I was too scared to call for a parking spot, all because I thought picking up the phone would be rude. It was a small thing, but it left me stressed and off-balance the whole interview. Sometimes the unwritten rules we learn about professionalism do more harm than good. Most principals are just busy people, juggling 100 things a day. They’d rather answer a quick question than see you show up unprepared. Right now, that’s working for me, and for the new teachers I mentor. We’ll see how Lila’s spot turns out, either way, it’s a good lesson that not every phone call is out of line.
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