I helped out a friend and taught a Pre-Engineering Class at the Fulton County STEM Magnet school a couple of decades ago. Based on that experience, I'm not sure they could pay me enough to teach high-school!
. My sister works for a school that actually had a civil engineering graduate from Tech apply and get a math teaching position at her school and I'm pretty sure he left after a month for civil engineering job.
As someone who has taught math/stats/economics at the HS level as a second career after leaving a career in engineering/management, this thread (both the on and off topic portions) has been interesting to me.
@85Escape - the key to enjoying this is being selective about where you work. I have taught in two schools (opposite extremes of the socioeconomic spectrum). One was a rural, poverty ridden area (think Appalachia) and the other a suburban, private school where the student lot is filled with BMW's, Audi's, Mercedes, etc. and tuition is over $20k per year. I enjoyed both. Why? The schools were small (both graduated approx. 75-100 students per year).So, you pretty much know every kid in the building and your typical class size is 12-16 students. That is what I like. I would not teach in one of the mega schools that have 2-4,000 students and a class has 30 kids in it. That may have been the environment you encountered.
@jcket05, your post speaks to another issue. The guy in your post did not leave bc of the salary. He knew what it was when he took the job. He just ran into what I believe most new teachers run into - these people (the teachers) were good students and had passion about the topics that they taught. They naturally assume that everyone else has those traits too. Well, they don't. I would venture to say every time I step into the math classroom, 90% of the students would NOT be there if given the choice. At both schools, due to seniority, I am not teaching the AP kids who love STEM and would be thrilled to go to GT. I am teaching everyone else. The skills it takes to succeed are not taught in college, whether it be in an education major OR anything else. I think my skills were developed by working in manufacturing - I spent almost 30 years around a blue collar work force who only possessed a HS diploma or equivalent. These people were obviously not interested in academis in an earlier life. But still, you had to teach and train them to perform complex tasks that in unpleasant environments where failure could have fatal implications. That is how I learned to teach. If you ask anyone else who teaches via a more traditional approach (HS to collge as an education major to teacher) they will all tell you that their training did not prepare them well at all. The emphasis was on the mundane (writing a lesson plan) and not on leading and motivation teenagers who wren't particularly interested in the subject matter. Again, as GT alums, who were god "at school" and I think default to the idea that everyone else is too.
One of the things that I think would "fix" education is the same thing that would improve a lot of other things in this country. I believe every adult in the school building should have a prerequisite of 10 years of "real world" experience. This closed lop system of going from HS to college back into the classroom is broken.
Thanks for indulging me. This is a subject that I am passionate about. Mods, recycle or move if warranted.
