Teaching

(however, I have known an equal number of people who have done the same and decided that it definitely is the career for them. So there you go.)

* um, two

I have two thoughts:

1. You might want to try and get some experience working at a school before commiting to any time and money consuming training. I think one reason for the high burn-out rate is that many people don't know what they are getting into. Also, I think many new teachers enter the classroom ill prepared and having some experience might help with that.

2. There are a lot of opportunities in education that exist outside of the classroom (research, policy, administration, curriculum development, teacher education/training, etc.). Even if you decide that teaching isn't your thing, your experiences would be valuable for a whole bunch of other jobs.

I recommend using your 3 or 4 months to do some voluntary teaching assistance, see if you like the classroom or not

xpost

I was really against the idea of teaching a few years ago, and I've always said I'll never be a teacher, but now it makes sense for a few reasons.

1) I have no clue what I really want to do as a career, but I knew I didn't want to end up in a city job like pretty much everyone else from my uni course.

2) It's a useful qualification to have, even if I don't end up teaching long term. If I have some other job ideas to try out, I can always take one or two years out to try them out, and when I really need money again I can easily go back into teaching.

3) It'll teach me some useful skills, that are useful not just in education. Things like presentation skills, leadership, people skills. The sort of thing that most jobs seem to want

4) Holidays
No other career will leave you with 2 months + holiday a year.

my finanical breakdown for maths teacher training goes:

£6000 (paid in monthly installments for the 9 months of the course)
regular Student loan on top (about £3000 hopefully)

which admittedly isn't MEGABUCKS but it's more more more than i'm used to as a student.

Then after a year of teaching i pocket a £5k "golden hello"

They were paying students loans off for you, but that's stopped now :(

That's what I'm doing too..

I'm training in Oxford.

in my exp with very low socio eco schools: as tempting as it is to let shit go, come down hard on the little things, real hard.

I'm still working on writing a book based on my experiences.

as tempting as it is to let shit go, come down hard on the little things, real hard.

Yeah-- I suspect that it's my mom's crazy strong behavior management skills that make her an effective teacher at the "at-risk" school she teaches at. In her case though, she teaches kindergarten, so the crappy parents are the worst problem she has to deal with. I've heard so many tales of woe in this regard over the years that I really don't buy into the whole "bad teachers" talking point at all-- I think that the failure of most schools is due to socioeconomics and lousy parenting (granted, there are bad teachers and administrators out there). I've just started looking into substitute teaching as a viable temporary career option, but I have pretty much no desire to deal with the kind of bullshit that my mom has had to deal with for the last thirty years (pity, because it's the big public school system that's probably dying for subs).

Just about every first year teacher ever, Im never sure if youre just pulling the piss Chris or not but re the bad teachers- its difficult to accept that when youre busting your gut.From memory of t col, research suggests that youre right.
However if youre looking at success relative to what youre starting with then mgmt and teachers make the difference even taking into account the window dressing.

Oy vey. Then I guess I should stop taking the piss here. ;_;

Just about every first year teacher ever

Well, duh. (The shit would take over my life and break my heart too. This, plus the feeling that I'm not worthy of the responsibility, is why I've stayed well out of it. These are the same reasons that I don't have kids of my own yet. Me subbing won't really be happening.) Except not so, for some of your "bad teachers" maybe?

From memory of t col, research suggests that youre right.

"t col" = "teaching college"? I dunno-- if you really want to fix the failing schools thing, then you need to fix America itself. Of course more excellent teachers would help, but there's so many people who have kids that just shouldn't (because they're not taking proper care of them), so much marginalization going on (the biggest reason that the public school system in my city is not so hot is probably that most of the white folks pulled their kids out of the system once integration started really happening), and standards as to what constitutes an education are so low for most people. If you believe that one embittered teacher guy from NY, public schools were never meant to give the proles an education anyway, just to make them usable workers. (If this is redundant on this thread, apologies, but I can't be bothered to read the whole damn thing again right now.)

I too have grown up with the expectation that, hey, English major, someday I'll be a teacher. But the teaching-English part of the job seems dwarfed by the administrative and disciplinarian aspects. I'm shy and conciliatory by nature; I don't think there's any way I could manage a classroom of thirty or more.

I am considering doing a teacher training course. Any UK experiences? I feel unsure what to do career wise and it seems I might enjoy teaching, plus it seems a good skill to learn.

I would love to be a teacher and I wld be fucking awesome at it but I am ill-suited at best for America's NCLB program and I don't think I'd want to teach in a college.

Basically I am thinking I'll use my teaching skills on whatever kids I make and then if I'm like 50 and things are wicked awesome in public education, I'll do it then.

"Wicked awesome" meaning "tolerable."

I guess the only thing that puts me off is that I might feel like a failure as regards journalism and stuff, even tho I'm sure teaching is damn challenging and rewarding too, and my realistic prospects as a journalist involve work that doesn't excite me.

been considering teaching for a good while now, but i know exactly what you mean in terms of it seeming like you're admitting you'll never be a millionaire at your chosen field.

lol late 20's.

on the plus side tho, it might be nice to be able to just write about whatever the fuck I want, have the time to do so, and for it not to have to be a career.

if you could steel yourself to genuinely not give a fuck then i think quality of life is nigh on untouchable given free time, pension, wages aren't even that bad ffs

^ attitude you want your child's teacher to have^

definitely, 2/3 months off in the summer paid is insane

3 minimum (if you don't want to pick up the fat cash for correcting exams) and then there's christmas, easter, midterms ah stop.

I just began an online/half-time fastrack course to get a license, and am excited to enter the classroom again as an actual active student of teaching. I've been subbing for going on two years in Minneapolis and Robbinsdale public/charter/private schools, usually teaching kids from poor neighborhoods.

I love it. There's dispiriting moments, but the exhilaration of a good week or a good day doesn't really compare to anything else. Now hopefully I'll get the skills to have good days all the time. That's the hope, anyway.

go pete!

Both my parents were public school teachers. My wife taught in public schools for 20 years. Most of the nights of my life I have heard teachers talking shop about teaching at the dinner table.

I would probably have been a pretty damn good teacher until the burnout caught up with me, but I conciously chose not to teach, because I started out life with a realistic view of the profession and never had the benefit of that early push of idealism most teachers need to get over the excruciating first couple of years.

Now I drive a school bus. Any teaching I do in that capacity is incidental. This suits me fine.

Oh, and... go pete!

Thanks! What's weird is that I'm old and don't consider myself an idealist, more like a "grant me the serenity to change what I can" type of guy. Not waking up every day believing humanity can save itself was a huge adjustment for me, and a painful one, but I already went through it many years ago--somewhere between 9/11 and Katrina. It was basically like letting go of a religion, but I'm sure I have other subconscious faiths in its place, though I gave up the dream of being famous years before that.

If what you mean by a realistic view is that teachers don't make the slightest difference in their students' lives, then yeah, I'm not quite ready for that bit of additional soul crushing.

Or maybe it's like getting religion, or getting Eastern religion,

Go for it!! I tried teacher training...did a Graduate Dip Ed after my Bachelor Degree, and I enjoyed the whole thing, all of the student teaching and practical lessons...but I chickened out of actually applying my degree once I got it. By the end I realized I was terrified of being the 'ringmaster'. I didn't feel, within myself, qualified to tell these kids about anything...aside from that I'd never had a real grownup job and the whole idea of applying for a teaching position just terrified me. So I went into publishing and never really looked back. BUT...and here's my point...the coolest thing I've seen is at least 4 of my friends from college, who had no inkling of being at teacher for years, have in the last 5 to 10 years all decided to enter teaching and all of them love it. Personally I think you're going the right way about it. You've lived some life, you know...now you've got some actual wisdom as well as a vim/vigor for actually teaching. I don't see how that's a bad thing at all. At. All.

First day today. Exhausted.

A year and a half later I've passed my teacher tests and submitted my portfolio, which means I'm done doing what I can to get a license even if for now I'm just a sub with more student-loan debt. But I gotta say, it's pretty great to come back to subbing with a clue about teaching. It makes a world of difference, and it's SO MUCH EASIER.

My first day as a full-time, permanent teacher yesterday was pretty awesome. Just learning to relax and put the students at ease has been huge. It's funny to read my rambling above, because teaching is so consistently fun once you learn how to do it that it doesn't really require that push of idealism beyond learning to do it.

Nice one Pete. I've always been told I'd make a good teacher, but to be honest I'd be terrified of standing up in front of a classroom of kids, so if you can do it that's some amazing work.

Congratulations, Pete. Some of them are a lot more awesome on the first day than four or five months from now, but in general, yes, it's a fun job.

If a friend had happily told me in 1996 that I would enjoy lecturing without pause in front of a group of one hundred forty students, I'd have called the funny farm. I didn't start to love it until my third year but there's no going back now.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-writing-revolution/309090/2/

Maybe the struggling students just couldn’t read, suggested one teacher. A few teachers administered informal diagnostic tests the following week and reported back. The students who couldn’t write well seemed capable, at the very least, of decoding simple sentences. A history teacher got more granular. He pointed out that the students’ sentences were short and disjointed. What words, Scharff asked, did kids who wrote solid paragraphs use that the poor writers didn’t? Good essay writers, the history teacher noted, used coordinating conjunctions to link and expand on simple ideas—words like for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so. Another teacher devised a quick quiz that required students to use those conjunctions. To the astonishment of the staff, she reported that a sizable group of students could not use those simple words effectively. The harder they looked, the teachers began to realize, the harder it was to determine whether the students were smart or not—the tools they had to express their thoughts were so limited that such a judgment was nearly impossible.

The exploration continued. One teacher noted that the best-written paragraphs contained complex sentences that relied on dependent clauses like although and despite, which signal a shifting idea within the same sentence. Curious, Fran Simmons devised a little test of her own. She asked her freshman English students to read Of Mice and Men and, using information from the novel, answer the following prompt in a single sentence:

“Although George …”

She was looking for a sentence like: Although George worked very hard, he could not attain the American Dream.

Some of Simmons’s students wrote a solid sentence, but many were stumped. More than a few wrote the following: “Although George and Lenny were friends.”

This is what I teach! Developmental writing. This is news?

Ha, yeah, having interviewed education researchers who specialise in literacy, this isn't that shocking.

This is almost NYT quiddity levels of "oh, the horror".

I mean, no joke, I plan to introduce coordinating conjunctions tomorrow.

Well, it's news to me, probably because I'm neither a teacher nor a writer. But I liked the article, and having line-edited a friend's graduate-level compositions, I suddenly recognized the strange problem she always had linking up her ideas. I was v confused that she could speak well and had good ideas and yet couldn't see how one word would pivot her whole sentence (or paragraph) around and make it illogical. Et viola, as they don't say.

See, I did not like the article. There are people doing all kinds of interesting things in this field, and I don't like when someone comes along and says I found the answer! They need instruction in basic sentence structure!
Well duh, yeah they do. I am a program coordinator and can confirm that there is an abundant need for these classes. But when The Atlantic rolls up and takes the tone of "writing revolution", it makes me feel invisible.

No, of course it does, and we can't have you feeling invisible; that is not a satisfactory outcome.

What kind of article would be more satisfactory? If a person who will never be a teacher wanted to learn more?

More about what? How to employ a developmental writing curriculum?
Here's a random article about using technology to approach the multilevel classroom, which is basically every developmental English or math class.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/03/10/companies_look_to_improve_developmental_and_remedial_education_products_using_adaptive_learning_technology

I guess that's more geared to the "they're trying to replace us with machines" angle, though.

Anyway, I gotta get to grading my first set of papers.

Class size:

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/10/how-important-is-class-size.html

"Internationally, the United States has larger than average class sizes, but a few of the nations with even bigger classes than ours, such as Korea, Japan, and Australia, clearly out-perform us academically--as do several countries, like Finland and Canada, that have made small classes a priority."

Not puzzling at all. The importance of class size is fluid--if you've got a class of 22, and four of them are high-needs IEP students, and another three are ESL, and one or two others are behaviour problems, that's much more challenging, from a teaching standpoint, than a mix of 30 high-medium students who are relatively motivated, comparatively independent, and don't have behavior issues. If you have support staff in the first instance, that closes the gap. But you may not. (Small class sizes are a priority in Canada at the primary level, yes; there's a hard cap of 22, I think. Junior and intermediate, less so--I might have 24, like this year, or I may have 27 or 29. The last two or three years have been pretty good.)

there's a hard cap of 22

I imagine that this is specific to Ontario? Have smaller class sizes been a priority throughout the country?

Teacher's college is one of the things I occasionally (and increasingly rarely) think about going back to school for. I keep hearing nightmarish stories about the waiting lines for f/t jobs in Central Canada though. My sense is that it's much better in the West? All our music ed grads do well (although, given what I've taken, it would actually be easier for me to become an English teacher than a hs music teacher.)

Yeah, I should have said Ontario rather than Canada--not sure what the numbers are elsewhere.

I went back when I was 30; got on the supply list right away, but it took me six years to get on full-time (mostly due to my own apathy, and antipathy to interviews). I hear from supply teachers and student teachers that the job situation is pretty dire right now--it's even hard to get on the supply list with my board. I'm talking about the elementary panel; high school, I don't know.

The problem is old guys like me who hang on forever.

Seriously thinking about this again.

The idea of going back to school (after teaching undergrads for five years) is genuinely demoralizing though.

Highly recommend 77 teacher thread for the ~inside scoop~ about teaching.

77?