Anonymous wrote:I’m all about this. Injecting some teachers with actual subject matter expertise will be great for kids.

I’m a career switcher. I’ve been teaching for almost 20 years now after spending time in “the real world.”

I went into teaching thinking it would be a breeze because I’m smart and I had real-world experience.

And then the classroom knocked me down. Hard. Fast. Teaching is SO MUCH MORE than content knowledge. It’s entertaining, presenting, conflict resolving, diversifying, planning, pivoting, motivating, nursing, evaluating, analyzing, mothering, drill-instructoring, disciplining, accommodating… all at the same time.

I know people like to think you can “just teach,” but it is a skilled profession. You need content knowledge, but you also have to know how to run a classroom. A lot of these DCUM posts scare me because they sound like the young, career-switching me who thought I could do so much better than those poor education majors because I was coming in with “real” skills.

I was so wrong. I’ve survived 20 years and I’m really good at what I do, but I certainly wasn’t at first. I had to learn HOW to teach, not just how to be smart.

If new teachers, including career-switching Feds, come in prepared to learn, then they can do well. If you think your experience will get you respect from kids, you’ll learn the lesson the way I did.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This may sound good to unemployed feds, but it isn't good for our schools. It's a bunch of completely unqualified people who will work at low pay rates and then quit as soon as they find something better - probably in 4 years, when someone starts putting the government back together. Although it's more likely they will quit as soon as they see how bad the job sucks.

Unqualified my ass. I know an engineer who retired from government service to go teach math and physics at a private school. He's getting rave reviews. Better to have a teacher with real world experience.

Just wait until real world experience meets the public school system.

Hun. You are all bureaucrats. I think Feds are actually particularly well suit s to working in public schools.

No we really aren’t. There are engineers and scientists doing lab work, for example.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This may sound good to unemployed feds, but it isn't good for our schools. It's a bunch of completely unqualified people who will work at low pay rates and then quit as soon as they find something better - probably in 4 years, when someone starts putting the government back together. Although it's more likely they will quit as soon as they see how bad the job sucks.

Unqualified my ass. I know an engineer who retired from government service to go teach math and physics at a private school. He's getting rave reviews. Better to have a teacher with real world experience.

Just wait until real world experience meets the public school system.

Hun. You are all bureaucrats. I think Feds are actually particularly well suit s to working in public schools.

+1

Anonymous wrote:I’m all about this. Injecting some teachers with actual subject matter expertise will be great for kids.

The best MS/HS teachers that my kids had were second career teachers with real world experience and subject matter expertise. Frankly, many of them were more passionate than some burnt-out career educators.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This may sound good to unemployed feds, but it isn't good for our schools. It's a bunch of completely unqualified people who will work at low pay rates and then quit as soon as they find something better - probably in 4 years, when someone starts putting the government back together. Although it's more likely they will quit as soon as they see how bad the job sucks.

Unqualified my ass. I know an engineer who retired from government service to go teach math and physics at a private school. He's getting rave reviews. Better to have a teacher with real world experience.

Just wait until real world experience meets the public school system.

Hun. You are all bureaucrats. I think Feds are actually particularly well suit s to working in public schools.

Anonymous wrote:This may sound good to unemployed feds, but it isn't good for our schools. It's a bunch of completely unqualified people who will work at low pay rates and then quit as soon as they find something better - probably in 4 years, when someone starts putting the government back together. Although it's more likely they will quit as soon as they see how bad the job sucks.

As a former teacher who became a Fed for the exact reason mentioned in your last sentence...this was exactly my experience and the experience of many other teachers who left the profession.

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Didn’t realize FCPS was this desperate.

Where have you been? All DMV school systems are this desperate, and have been since 2020. Good for FCPS. Thanks for posting, OP.

They are not desperate. I am a veteran teacher and have been interviewing with all the counties recently. I've had offers from quite a few school administrators, but run into trouble with HR when I turned out to be too expensive, or wasn't willing to accept a lower pay step than where I should be based on experience and education. I think they are primarily interested in new teachers or people with no teaching experience because they are much cheaper than experienced teachers. I see this as a bad sign for the teaching profession.

They are desperate and underfunded.

Both can be true.

Yes, both are probably true. But this just shows that the cuts to feds will affect us all. Having a huge glut of highly educated but unemployed workers is likely to drive down salaries for all professions, as it seems poised to do for teachers, who have fought long and hard just to get a livable wage.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This may sound good to unemployed feds, but it isn't good for our schools. It's a bunch of completely unqualified people who will work at low pay rates and then quit as soon as they find something better - probably in 4 years, when someone starts putting the government back together. Although it's more likely they will quit as soon as they see how bad the job sucks.

Have them go in as reading assistants for lower ES.

Having more bodies for small group work can only help.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Of all the things in school that are truly difficult to teach and require real experience, education, and expertise, reading is number one. And a bad "helper" can do real damage at that age.

--A career switcher now teaching for about 10 years

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This may sound good to unemployed feds, but it isn't good for our schools. It's a bunch of completely unqualified people who will work at low pay rates and then quit as soon as they find something better - probably in 4 years, when someone starts putting the government back together. Although it's more likely they will quit as soon as they see how bad the job sucks.

Unqualified my ass. I know an engineer who retired from government service to go teach math and physics at a private school. He's getting rave reviews. Better to have a teacher with real world experience.

Just wait until real world experience meets the public school system.

I’m all about this. Injecting some teachers with actual subject matter expertise will be great for kids.

Anonymous wrote:This may sound good to unemployed feds, but it isn't good for our schools. It's a bunch of completely unqualified people who will work at low pay rates and then quit as soon as they find something better - probably in 4 years, when someone starts putting the government back together. Although it's more likely they will quit as soon as they see how bad the job sucks.

Have them go in as reading assistants for lower ES.

Having more bodies for small group work can only help.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Didn’t realize FCPS was this desperate.

Where have you been? All DMV school systems are this desperate, and have been since 2020. Good for FCPS. Thanks for posting, OP.

They are not desperate. I am a veteran teacher and have been interviewing with all the counties recently. I've had offers from quite a few school administrators, but run into trouble with HR when I turned out to be too expensive, or wasn't willing to accept a lower pay step than where I should be based on experience and education. I think they are primarily interested in new teachers or people with no teaching experience because they are much cheaper than experienced teachers. I see this as a bad sign for the teaching profession.

They are desperate and underfunded.

Both can be true.

Anonymous wrote:This may sound good to unemployed feds, but it isn't good for our schools. It's a bunch of completely unqualified people who will work at low pay rates and then quit as soon as they find something better - probably in 4 years, when someone starts putting the government back together. Although it's more likely they will quit as soon as they see how bad the job sucks.

Unqualified my ass. I know an engineer who retired from government service to go teach math and physics at a private school. He's getting rave reviews. Better to have a teacher with real world experience.

Anonymous wrote:This may sound good to unemployed feds, but it isn't good for our schools. It's a bunch of completely unqualified people who will work at low pay rates and then quit as soon as they find something better - probably in 4 years, when someone starts putting the government back together. Although it's more likely they will quit as soon as they see how bad the job sucks.

It depends. Your point is valid but you also could get some really great and highly educated people with a lot of real world experience going into teaching jobs. That doesn’t mean they’ll be good teachers but some of them definitely could be.

This may sound good to unemployed feds, but it isn't good for our schools. It's a bunch of completely unqualified people who will work at low pay rates and then quit as soon as they find something better - probably in 4 years, when someone starts putting the government back together. Although it's more likely they will quit as soon as they see how bad the job sucks.