46 According to NPR, our teachers are getting old. High school teachers. Hmmm.
I wanted to be a high school science teacher. The job seems pretty cute in many regards. The only obnoxious part would be teaching the same thing 8 times a day – or so I thought. Then there are the students, which you can no longer discipline without getting sued. Then there are the parents, who appear to have the ability to hover around the school criticizing your teaching. A mix of over protective parents and Laissez-faire parents gives a body of apathetic or over eager students. I don’t know if it’s ever been much different though.
The politics of elementary education are no worse than the politics of… well… any education. You always worry about funding and, even more shitty than that, you have no control over it. Grants come in the $1,000 range and last for a few weeks. As a PhD, you get paid, if you’re lucky, about $20,000 less than if you went into research academics. If you’re unlucky, that number could be as high as $40,000. Industry? Pfft. How does a $50,000 discrepancy between teaching at an Indianapolis high school and working at Eli Lilly strike you?
Being a High Schooler was fun, but it wasn’t free of vitriol toward a body of teachers paralyzed by a restrictive curriculum set by the state and money that simply didn’t exist. Our massive discount warehouse high schools, (mine having over 2,300 students and a few miles away, in the fine city of Indianapolis, North Central was busting out almost 4,000 students at the time) makes for enormous, unsupervised cliques of students which, by their very nature, had to be controlled through CCTV, restrictive schedules and lock downs, random drug searches with dogs and somewhat frequent “interviews” with the office. While I was largely left to my own devices by my high school, which was very well to do financially, the teachers wore both hats of educators and prison guards. My hustle to get out is dutifully noted in my high school transcript, which only contains three years worth of course work. (Like I say, I liked the life of a high schooler – I couldn’t stand the high school.)
To be a teacher these days requires more than just starry eyed optimism, it requires blind idealism.
In all, I wouldn’t do it. That noise is for chumps.
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What, you mean you don’t want to give back to that nurturing community that raised you to be the fine chemist you are today? You don’t want to influence the next generation, inspire them to love and treasure chemistry, become upstanding citizens…
Yeah! I can understand that!
Anytime someone tells me that being something is equivalent to being a hero, I know someone is likely to get screwed. Expecting it for moments might be OK, but expecting someone to do it for an entire career implies that society knows that there are not enough resources to do the job it requires, and it is unwilling to provide them – society would prefer instead that people sacrifice themselves so that it can avoid having to come up with the resources required. Teachers, police, firepeople, military – the jobs we most need done (or say we most need done) – seem to chronically lack resources. No one claims this of doctors (yet), though in many ways they sacrifice a lot to do what they do – they are paid enough to do what they do, and in most cases given enough resources to do it well. Most fields don’t also ask their practitioners to take pay cuts (my local district will probably want its teachers to pay more in health care while getting below-inflation raises – of course, most jobs don’t have unions or other organization to tell the employers where to place the request).
I can see helping, but I don’t really think I would want to be a teacher (aside from not having been very good when having the chance). If someone hadn’t done something similar for me, I wouldn’t be here, and that would be bad for me.
most of the people I know that became teachers became teachers for the same reason as the generation above us. they didnt know what the hell else to do with their degree. Or course there are exceptions, but anyone with any real talent/ambition will go on to better paying jobs with better benefits.
After a successful career in the Oil Industry, giving the Devil his dues.
I came home to work in my home state of Maine in a low paying, rural poor school. I love my job, I teach, I teach Chemistry, I push an pull on the gray matter of kids to get them to think a little differently than the last generation. It is a career with some social responsibility to it and love. I have ideas, ideals and can keep my curiosity.
From the Movie “Say Anything”
I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.
More than likely, you’re going to be a babysitter, not a teacher- it doesn’t matter what grade you teach. I don’t know what it’s like in Britain/Canada, but here, being a teacher is more akin to babysitting than teaching. Kyle’s right: the kids don’t care, the parents REALLY don’t care, you can no longer discipline them without getting punished severely for it, the required curricula are terrible. Both of my parents are teachers- I don’t want to get into their racket. It requires the patience of a saint.
America’s elementary/secondary school system is far from admirable. I dare say it’s the shittiest in the first world. People like Kyle and myself succeed DESPITE experiences in grade school, not because of it. Grade school never inspired much love of learning from me- aside from band, in any case.
And the biggest problem is that it’s a social issue. Per student, the American government puts more money in the system than ANY other country and get less out of it. Parents and families just don’t give a shit anymore. Schools are now zero-tolerance dungeons where students are arrested instead of disciplined like, well, children should be. No amount of money is going to save the appalling attitude of the American populace in terms of education. And now, since high school has failed to train students for the real world, they’re going to college now- and bringing their worthless attitudes that should drive them straight into the ground with them.
Such angst! Educated in prison-like conditions no less! Rats on this post.
May as well hustle on that pharma job and become a sessile polyp.
Uch. You can lick my sack, buddy.
After finishing my teaching degree I taught for axactly 1 year before I ran back to academics and started being a student again, a PhD student.
My reasons for farting in the face of education:
underpaid,half that of an industry job
Ever chanching eductional frame work. We had to implement a new system while we even hadn’t implemented the last one and the children had now idea anymore what they were suppose to do. This resulted in many good students, who would do really well in a proper stabile system that takes multiple learing styles in consideration, following courses way below their ability.
REALLY unmotivated colleges. Mostly elderly colleges who had seen it all and just couldn’t give a flying fuck anymore.
Disciplenary issues, the children know you cannot back up any of your ‘threats’ One of my students went to the principle and acused me of trying to to get him to smuggle some hasj from Marocco for me. He did this to blackmail me because I asked him to sit down while he didn’t feel like it. The acusation was taken seriously.
And last but not least: THE reason I wanted to become a teacher. I wanted to share my enthousiasm for chemistry with the new generation..yeah yeah call me an idealistic sucker.. Anyway the chemistry curriculum was intergrated with the physics curriculum by an physics oriented knowledge panel. Result there wasn’t much chemistry left for me to teach..ergo I RESIGNED and promised never to come back.
I’m currently writing up my thesis and god knows its a fucking ordeal but I still prefer it to teaching.
The other alternative, if you can swing it, is to teach in a private school. You often get paid less and the job security isn’t as good (in addition to being at the whim of an all powerful headmaster). However, the class size is usually smaller and the parental involvement is much higher (since they’re paying out the bucks to send the kids there). For example, my wife (with a BS in chem) teaches at a school for kids with mild learning disabilities and only has six kids in her biggest class, while making about 14K more a year than my grad school stipend and getting nearly 3 months off every year. She likes it.
http://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/eb/govbudpreview07.asp
The California State revised education budget for 2007-2008 is $55.022 billion. Of that, at least $50.6 billion is directly paid to managerial, legal, medical, and pension concerns. In theory each kid is funded $8250/attendance-day. IS THAT BIG ENOUGH? In fact it cannot be more than $660/day. IS THAT BIG ENOUGH?
Even with corruption, could you educate your kid for $660/day net? Given US average 180 school days/year, that is $118,800. Could your whole family live on that tax-free and your kids still be educated at home? The mind boggles. Get a gun and start killing educators.
no, the educators are fine. Get a gun and start killing education administrators.
Actually, I think that the $8250 is the cost per student per year, there are probably about 5M students is california all together, what the “average” means is that on an average day that’s how many students are sitting with their asses on chairs.
So for an average 180 school days/year, that’s approx. $40/student/day.
Considering the salary of an average teacher, a lot of that still goes to waste, and is inexcusable.
http://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/fr/eb/govbudpreview07.asp
Read the goddamned URL tables. It is an annual swindle dwarfing Enton’s best summed efforts. The only possible conclusions are
1) Blacks and Browns are overall purely ineducable;
2) A rather large number of people in suits should be lined up against a wall and shot.
The Official Truth: “California High School Exit Examination Intensive Instruction ($72.4 million)”
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/immig.htm
The real world truth – what $72.4 million purchased
OMG teh blacks iz bein TEACHED at. fuckin waste of $$$
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/lajos.htm#a2
grow benzil crystals to prove blacks are inferior!!11oneone
“As a PhD, you get paid, if you’re lucky, about $20,000 less than if you went into research academics.”
Yeah, and we all know how much most research academics are getting paid…
Hey, Yahoo News wrote a story about this! It looks like your post came out earlier than theirs, so it’s an honest ’submitted at the same time’ coincidence of great thought getting published. Unlike your previous blatant plagiarism of Derek Lowe’s post on copying stuff.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/2.....atteachers
Do you honestly not see how often I have been ripped off? Not just in terms of posts, but also in style and even the layout of my site?
Yet I don’t bitch. It’s all about da people.
Well, it’s not as bad as being scooped (in research). I hate when that happens.
Hey, on an unrelated note, I was watching MIT open courseware videos of chemistry courses, and it made me sad how much I’ve forgetten. I’ll never be able to cut in in academia if I can’t recall what the Born-Oppenheimer approximation is in a span of five seconds. I guess that high school teaching job is for me…
Teacher’s need the support of parents (ideally a mom and a dad) in the education of students. For MOST successful HS students, I suspect they had a solid support structure at home. It seems to me that parents either don’t give a damn or they see the teacher as the jerk who is the reason for their failing child.
All the money in the world won’t make parents do what they are supposed to do.
As an organic Ph.D. student who is seriously considering a career as a high school chemistry teacher, your arguments are extremely weak.
Let’s start with salary…I don’t think anyone who opts to enter into the field of education (no matter the level) expects to get paid a salary equivalent to that of someone who enters private research sector. Those who choose to go into academics usually do so in order to make a contribution, whether it be towards the scientific community at large to towards individual students. If one goes into high school education and expects to become a wealthy individual solely on the salary of a public (or private) school educator has a BIG wake up call in his or her future.
On to the “obnoxious” and, difficult or apathetic students and parents…No matter what career path on which one embarks, one WILL have to deal with people whose personalities as well as whose approaches to life and work you do not like. The stereotypes that are established in high school NEVER go away. This is not to say that the stereotypical category one fell into in high school follows one through life; however, one always is going to encounter the most popular, the loner, the geek, the rich girl/guy, the cheerleader, the jock, the dolt, the suck up, and the bad boy types. Yes, the definitions of these stereotypes are modified as one progresses through life, but, nevertheless, they exist, just as they did at one’s undergraduate and graduate institutions/departments. One must find ways to deal with them, often as a means to achieve success in one’s own career; one need not like everyone…just find a way to work with them.
Moreover, if one chooses to teach at a small liberal arts college, one must deal with the same difficult, obnoxious and apathetic students and parents (yes… parents do call, especially the more influential ones, explaining why little Johnny or Suzy should not have received an “F” on this lab report or on that last exam). The same is true at moderately sized research institutions where there is a strong focus on undergraduate education. At both of these types of universities, one also will have the added pressure of meeting the universities expectations (from attending the opening year mass/celebration to meeting with Mr. So-and-So who just donated a new science wing). This is analogous to public school officials who will set teaching standards. The difference is that these situations will affect one’s standing as a professor within one’s own department and within the university at large; if one has not achieved tenure, it WILL affect one’s ability to do so. Meeting public/private school educational curriculum requirements is much easier to achieve and can be tweaked slightly without major consequences.
Really, is the salary of an assistant professor worth the daily “hassles”? Everyone knows that in industry, one is “under the gun” to perform and if one cannot perform, one is fired. Are industrial salaries worth the pressures the company places on their scientists? These questions are akin to those that your latest blog post raises about becoming a high school educator. Kyle, you may not have wanted to pursue a career as a high school educator, but there are plenty of Ph.D students who are thinking about this as a possible career option upon their graduation. Your post is discouraging and disheartening.
If you are going to post on the drawbacks of a high school teacher, let’s be completely honest and talk about the drawbacks of all the other possible career pathways for scientists. Before one ventures on a so chosen career path, the individual needs to weigh the pros and cons of those careers that are appealing TO THE INDIVIDUAL. Those who do go into high school academics as a Ph.D. should be commended; they may be educating a student (apathetic or over-zealous) who may significantly impact YOUR life (from being your son/daughter in law to being a governmental policy maker to reviewing your next grant proposal or scientific journal article).
So basically what you’re saying is that there will always be people who want to be educators (people like yourself), and that no amount of downsides to the profession will keep these people from wanting to do it. I can agree with you there- there will always be people whose goal is to teach.
You’re missing Kyle’s point entirely, and I think the reason why you are is because you want to be a teacher. However, let’s consider a person with a science background who has to decide on a career that gives the most benefits for the work necessary- an internal cost/benefit ratio, if you will. Secondary education (education at ANY grade, really, but secondary education in particular) is low in benefits compared to cost- the pay isn’t good, the workload can be tremendous and the stress factor is very high. However, as long as you don’t fuck your students, you’ll have a job. Industry is more volatile but the pay is much better and you don’t have to take your work home with you.
In short, education has little to offer to most educated people who are looking for a career, and school administrators, teachers’ unions, government funding agencies and society in general don’t really seem to give a shit. Go ahead and teach if you want, but your rant amounts to little more than self-justification.
The irony is that precisely because teaching is vocation with avocational qualities, there’s a heightened elasticity, and teachers get shafted. I’m thinking about teaching high school chemistry, but I sure as hell won’t do it in California. The red tape, hurdles, and sheer nonsense are simply not worth the low pay, not to mention “fair share” fees.
An even bigger irony is how things are right now, 10 months or so after these posts…the economy has gone to shit (meaning industrial jobs are now gone) and the only safe out is teaching. Ha ha ha…
They aren’t arguments, they’re platitudes. Nothing I’ve said here hasn’t already been stated over and over and over and over by brazillions of other people.
Given the lack of originality (and their ubiquitous interpretation as fact) of my “arguments,” it sounds more like you’re trying to convince yourself that I’m wrong. I wish you the best of luck in that.
I’m not going to argue with your assertions about the negative side of teaching because I believe they are mostly true, but I think its pretty selfish to say that high school teachers are chumps. I imagine more than one reader of this blog was turned on to chemistry in high school by just such a “chump”, so maybe we should be thankful for those who are willing to make the necessary sacrifices for this to happen.
I also think the attitude you and others have displayed in the post and comments are part of the reason why it is increasingly hard to attract good teachers (aside from all the economic reasons). In many other industrialized countries teaching is a prestigious occupation, here we deride educators as essentially not being interested enough in “getting theirs”.
Finally, to all those who have been speculating as to the reasons why the system is flagging, stick to subjects you know something about. It is most assuredly not “parents and families just don’t give a shit anymore”. This has been shown to be true in only a very small minority of households. You are certainly entitled to your opinion, but you should know that the current research in the area suggests you are basing your ideas on an observational fallacy.
If you are interestedin understanding the issue more deeply, I would recommend looking at the NELS 2000 dataset, which can be manipulated quite easily with SPSS and is available for public use.
If by chump, you mean someone who is either deceived or a willing “martyr” into accepting economic hardship for nonexistent prestige?
Chump’s a pretty good descriptive noun for grad student, too.
I don’t think teachers should teach for prestige. That’s lame — fuq that noiz. The two reasons why people should teach are: 1) because they are good at it or 2) because they feel it’s a calling. This of course does not mean that they should necessarily teach.
This should be the case for any job.
However, what complicates the situation is that you cannot have 100% good teachers 100% of the time unless you are 100% lucky. And you only get one chance at childhood and being fucked up by a bad teacher is a irreversible loss of time, at best. So ideally there’s a zero tolerance criterion for the position.
Nope. They’re chumps. Sorry, chump. People with PhDs in non-educational fields that want to enter into elementary education are doomed to failure. In my limited experience I’ve seen only a handful (i.e. one out of six or so) of them not become bitter, disillusioned or just plain run the fuck over by their classes. (this is in public education, mind you. I don’t know what those crazy folks in the private sector do. It’s likely greener pastures everywhere but the wallet.)
In educator’s defense, I’m not intending to imply people with PhDs are smarter than people who teach high school or something with masters degrees or bachelors degrees, but they generally seem to have a very different perspective on education. Most schools aren’t willing to hire a PhD in the first place and when they do, the food chain in schools dictate that they start out teaching at the bottom. I.e. “general science” or “environmental science” or whatever soft science that involves mostly pretty pictures and playing with putty. Those classes contain the apathetic, the stupid, the lost and forgotten and everyone else that didn’t or couldn’t make it into chemistry, physics and biology for the thinkin’ man. Somehow people with PhDs forget those people were there in high school with them – or remember them fondly for some reason. There’s no reason to remember those kids fondly, unless they just did a bang up job changing your oil. Spending 8-10 years out of high school (more if you post doc) before returning to teach is almost foolish. A PhD would be lucky to get a nice job in a good school teaching AP subjects – luck that’s unequivocally unfair to people that have worked in the system for years and still have to teach ‘freshman biology’ or ‘cooking science’.
And this is not the place to gnash your keyboard thinking we’ll eventually believe the nigh-stupid level of optimism young teachers have going into the profession. It doesn’t last except in manic depressives, and they’re crazy to begin with.
Please take note that Sir Kyl speaks in generalities. In my home state, my old, public high school will get first dibs on me if I should decide to teach there, and the school system will even waive the requirement for a teaching credential while I’m starting out.
Of course at my high school the chemistry teacher was 24, so that slot won’t be open for years and years.
This particular state happened to also be pretty good at ignoring fatuous red tape — the physics teacher technically was only credentialed for teaching mathematics (but he was an amazing physics teacher — I slept through the first two quarters of honors intro physics in college, some of the exam questions were homework questions from my high school).
I guess the idea was, “principal knows best”. If a teacher sucked, the principal would have kicked their ass out of school. (This happened a few times)
by contrast, in my adopted state of california none of that shit would fly. A friend of mine has been a substitute teacher in two districts (complete with automated phone calling and long-distance drives) for two years — just to get her foot in the door, finally she’s gotten a permanent position due to a teacher dropping out for half a year for maternity leave. Still next year she may not necessarily be teaching full time.
The postdoc (now professor) sitting behind me — her fiance (now husband) was a teacher from XX state for several years and STILL had to substitute teach for a year and work to get california credentialed. It was a huge stressor on their relationship but luckily she’ll assume the faculty position in-state and so all that will not be for naught.
Which state do you think has a better reputation for k-12 education? Not california.
Update:
Substitute teacher has just gotten a job with a christian mission teaching in Honduras.
Hm. So I know four young people who were starting to be teachers in my city in California. One dropped out and now works for an investment firm. His girlfriend is still a teacher, but settled (almost tenured) in a charter school. A third was a math teacher but got bumped due to mandatory firings and now tutors kids on the evenings and weekends (her boyfriend makes six figures playing online poker). A fourth is flying off to honduras in september.
“In many other industrialized countries teaching is a prestigious occupation, here we deride educators as essentially not being interested enough in “getting theirs”.”
name 3
Teaching is the 4rth most prestigious occupation in the US according to this survey by Harris.
I agree that a PhD holder going back to teach high school is a waste of resources and is probably not generally a good idea. My interpretation of your comment was that anyone who teaches in K-12 is a chump. Perhaps this was incorrect.
pi* – Germany, Japan, South Korea, or you can pick other European nations such as Ireland or France. BEMAS 2001, Vol 29(2) 139–152
Good find on the Harris poll. My point wasn’t that we as a country think teachers are the scum of the Earth, but that there are many people who think it is stupid to do something for the greater good or who feel that any job satisfaction they might enjoy is not worth the monetary sacrifice that was made to get it. How is deciding you want to teach high school any different than being a professor in that regard?
My goal isn’t to “gnash your keyboard thinking {you will] eventually believe”, its to get highly educated smart people thinking about the problem in some other way than what effectively amounts to “teachers are idiots for being teachers”. Would we be saying that if teachers made a wage that was merit-based or if it was enough to attract high skilled individuals such as this blog’s readership (PhD issue aside)? What does the fact that these economic conditions don’t exist in the United States say about our society?
I asked a couple postdocs, Germany teaching was much better 20 yrs ago than today, anyone with a phd teaching highschool probably couldnt get a better job. same goes for france. dont know about ireland.
How come Germany did so bad on the international Pisa tests then? The US beat them, for Heyzues’ sake. And how come, after instituting reforms five years ago, they are doing better today?
Maybe they got paid more, but it sure didn’t make for better results.
I just remembered my high school chemistry teacher! What a douche… To think I actually wanted to go into chemistry before high school. I got As in all subjects except for one, and that was chemistry, where I was lucky to get a B-. Of course, most of it was due to skipping class to do a part time painting job since the guy was an ass and made me hate chemistry, with the subsequent vendetta marking lowering my grade.
No wonder I quit chemistry after one year when I was in university. I still thought that after my horrible high school experience, I would major in it… but I was wrong (well, only partly wrong since I’m here). The guy enjoyed making himself look superior and would mumble on about the most inane garbage with no enthusiasm for his subject. This was an IB Chemistry class mind you. I still got good marks on the AP and IB exams, but I bombed the class final and didn’t take the last few tests (due to skipping to work at the part-time job and drinking with the girlfriend).
Apparently he had a doctorate in chem. He’s teaching at a university right now. Imagine what kind of chump you have to be to get a doctorate, then teach in high school for less pay (although the top salary there is now 70k — it’s a public school and it’s more than an assistant prof at the local university makes), and then do it so badly that you discourage your students from pursuing that career. Out of all the other people in my IB class, I’m 95% positive I’m the only one who, eventually, got a chemistry degree.
I’m a high school physics teacher. I think it is a great job. Most of the complaints listed above are stereotypes that just simply aren’t true. Of course not all public schools are the same, but I’ve taught at three different schools in the Northeast so I’ve got some ground to stand on.
Pay: Of course the pay sucks. But before I was a high school teacher I worked in Mission Control at NASA, and if you figure out the hourly rate, I’m paid more as a teacher. The reason pay is low as a teacher is because I have a total of about 3 months of vacation. At NASA I had two weeks.
Student: In six years of teaching I have had two students that were jerks. Every other student was a joy to interact with. They may have done poorly. Maybe they didn’t care about physics, but they were still nice people. Can you honestly say that over 99% of the people you deal with on a daily basis are nice, enjoyable people? I can.
Parents: The parents are harder to deal with than the students, but I probably just average 2 problems with parents per year, and they are never serious.
Administration, regulations, state defined curriculum etc: There are certain things we are supposed to do, hoops we are supposed to jump through, curriculum we are supposed to follow. But if you are a good teacher you can pretty much just pay lip service to all these things and the administration will ignore you. They know good science teachers are hard to find. They know I’m a good science teacher. I can basically do what I want…as long as I continue being a good science teacher.
Reading all the complaints in the comments above, I kept thinking that either the person writing was spouting the typical media/Hollywood stereotypes and didn’t have a clue, or they went to a really crappy school.
The reasons to be a teacher:
1. Get to deal with fun and interesting people every day at work.
2. Get awesome vacations.
3. Way more challenging than sitting at a computer all day. As a physics teacher, my job isn’t to figure out physics all day. My job is to figure out people, and how to get these people to understand concepts that often seem foreign. Figuring out people is challenging, and I love challenges.
4. Every once in a while, you get to change someones life drastically for the better. This has only happened 2 or 3 times in the six years I’ve been teaching, but it is a great feeling!
Remember, if you become a chemistry teacher, your job isn’t to teach chemistry. Your job is to teach kids. The kids are your job, and from my experience, the kids are great!
Sounds like you are in Texas.
Good rule of thumb: pick red states if you’re gonna be a teacher.
But pick blue state if you’re gonna be a student.
Peg Luksik has a lot to say about what went wrong with education in America
wow, that was a very interesting video. government can be quite sneaky when it wants to control things
You make some good points, but as someone currently going back to school (i only have a lowly MS, not a PhD) to teach HS chemistry, i have to say i don’t understand the point of bashing people who want to teach? I have gotten mainly negative messages since i made my decision – people telling me i’m crazy, don’t do it, my life will suck, i’m being stupid, or a chump.
So, is your goal to ensure that people who are enthused about teaching and might actually do a good job and positively influence some students, are dissuaded by your arguments, and end up NOT teaching? Who is that helping? You? Your future hypothetical children? Other teachers? The students? The huge problem that is the public educational system in the US? I agree that you are entitled to your opinion on all things, and this is your blog to do with as you see fit, but i don’t understand who is being helped by the constant negative messages being sent to potential teachers.
I’m not being snarky. I’m honestly curious what the desired outcome of this strategy is.
Some people think its the students that drive veteran teachers to cynicism, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s the other teachers that do it. Education differs by state, and it differs by county and township. In short, education in the US is highly inconsistent and, as such, you may well be quite fortunate to land a very good job teaching a science curriculum you designed to well behaved and curious students.
But that’s probably not going to be the case. Most likely, for your first job, you’ll teach the shitty lower general science courses the far less studious kids are in. That curriculum will have already been decided for you at the federal, state and county level. You are, after all, teaching to a test now.
I’m probably pulling most of this out of my ass, but my wife is a teacher. It’s the reality of the situation. Education can be a very spiritually rewarding career for a few people but for others, it’s work – a job – because of statutory requirements placed on educators at the state and federal level. I’m bitching, not about teachers per se, but the situation they’re in and the circumstances that surround that. I would like you to get angry at what I say, but telling me to that I’m being discouraging is the wrong place to vent that. The right place is your congressman and senators and union reps and get No Child Left Behind repealed and return the schools to the teachers.
Or be a chump, I guess. Those are your options.
I’m not certain you answered my question. You clarified your position very nicely, and said some very true things. Things which i totally agree with. I only wonder what outcome is desired by discouraging people from teaching? Not just you, but people in general who do that when learning someone with 10+ years of work experience is leaving the fast paced life of a research chemist to teach.
Merely curious. Your words have never made me angry; in fact i usually crack up daily. But this post repeats a message that is given to a lot of career changing teachers (and for all i know people for whom teaching is their first career) and i’m afraid i don’t understand why you would want to ask people not to teach.
I have been reading the posts on here as an outsider. I think its awesome you want to be a teacher. Follow your belief in your work. Good luck.