Targum: Teaching in a Down Economy

To those students who struggle to find jobs with degrees in science and math, there’s really no excuse to be unemployed when New York City consistently faces teaching shortages each year in both the math and sciences.

The ultimate form of demonstrating your understanding of what you’ve worked so hard achieving in your 4 years in college is to teach it to others. And with the increasing salaries for highly qualified teachers, it’s mind-boggling to me why more college grads don’t enter the profession.

My first year salary was $42,550. As of this year, the starting salary for incoming teachers will be $45,500. This may not seem like much, but for 185 days of work during the school year and plenty of over-time opportunities ($40 per hour), it’s a lot more than you realize.

Recently I was made aware of a local news article that described how Rutgers students were having difficulty finding jobs as graduating seniors. To this I advise my fellow Scarlet Knights to consider applying to teaching programs such as the NYC Teaching Fellows (February 9^th deadline) or Teach for America.

Many students may be hesitant to take that step forward towards applying for a teaching job. I had to make that decision as well. My options senior year was either to apply to grad schools, find work, or apply for research fellowships. I stumbled upon the NYC Teaching Fellows site and on a whim sent in my application.

The only excuse you really have is yourself. New York City offers such an amazing incentive for alternatively certified teachers that it’s rather silly to pass up. At this point in my service to my community, I have become an asset.

I know there are probably a lot of horror stories that spread around about teaching in New York City. I know I have my fair share of bad stories to tell (just read the last 3 letters I wrote to the Targum). But for every bad story, there are plenty of good ones. Students idolize their teachers, even if they don’t like the subject matter.

Just this month, I was calling every one of my students a dugong. They’d give me baffled looks and would question me what a dugong was. In my attempt to get them to conduct their own research, I would never tell them. I even called other teachers dugongs and would get them to look it up. Isn’t it amazing how infectious curiosity can be? The greatest reward from this exercise is to see the reactions after students and teachers have looked it up. They’d come back and complain or they’d comment on how cute they are or how dugongs are awesome or they’d just wonder what I meant by calling them a dugong. And once the students know what dugongs are, you get philosophical and wonder, does a dugong know it’s a dugong? Or use it in class in homework problems or in-class word problems.

So perhaps the only reason that Rutgers students can’t find work after they graduate is because they’re just a bunch of dugongs…

I have come to appreciate the fine art of teaching. I can only hope that students who automatically write off education as a possible career would give it a chance or consider it an alternative to unemployment. Who knows, you dugongs just might like it.