Member-only story
No, Those Education Classes Won’t Help
When my career as a high school teacher flew off a cliff
I switched careers in my early forties. After trying teaching at a local for-profit disasterpiece of a college, I figured I could manage high school. I was warned, and it turned out to be true — high school was harder.
I was very lucky because I got hired on Emergency Certification, which is educator talk for “we can’t find anyone crazy enough to teach these classes.”
They assigned me to an inner city school with the learning disabled and emotional disabled kids, where you had to hide your copy paper stash because we were so low on supplies.
I was intimidated at first, since I was no expert in learning disabilities, but it turned out to be the best possible place for me.
The classes were small, the kids were fine, and I learned a lot about of how Special Ed functions or, as Sting put it so succintly:
“Things they would not teach you of in college”
Several years later, with a grand total of three years teaching — two of them high school — I decided to get certified. It was a huge mistake and here are the reasons it backfired on me.
