Teaching Career

[zander]

I am finally going to do what I should have done a long time ago, and become a teacher, a high school biology teacher to be exact. I have been trying to figure out how exactly to do that. From what I have found out, there is a way to get your teaching certificate while getting your Master's in Teaching at Missouri State. My bachelor's degree was in wildlife biology from Louisiana Tech University. In 1998 I went to Oklahoma State University to get my Master's degree in botany. Originally my master's project was going to look at seed dispersal by bison bodies and bison droppings across the plains but my major professor took my first year there on sabbatical in Sweden and didn't bother to tell me. That first year I had my first real brush with teaching since I was on a teaching assistantship. I loved it. I ended up changing master's projects twice more, once to looking at alkaloid production in relation to photocycle by periwinkles (the alkaloids are used against cancer) and then the ethnobotany of the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma where I interviewed the tribal elders about their traditional plant usage and then built a traditional plant garden where elders could teach the tribal youth about these things right by the community center. While doing this project I discovered that academic politics is a castle built on sand. New dept head, new priorites and big shakeups. Believe it or not, I had managed to keep teaching for four years while all of this is going on and that is what I really enjoyed about grad school. It wasn't the course work or research it was the teaching. By this time I had accumulated more than my fair share of student loans and it was time for another change. I left grad school with 32 graduate credit hours but no Masters and worked for a year for the university as a molecular biologist on a USDA grant. Grant was up, not renewed, I moved back to Missouri and away from science. well after a while I realized that this is not what God put me here to do. In the Summer of 2010 I will start the Master of Arts in Teaching program as Missouri State and HOPEFULLY be able to find a high school biology teaching job at the same time. I plan on trying to sub as much as possible next year to try to get my name and face out there for potential jobs one day.

I say all of that to ask the following, since you (speaking to teachers here) now know my situation, what other advice could you give me that would help me along this path? Thanks for the replies.

[rps]

Sounds like you have been planning and researching.

Your content area will mean you have no problem getting hired.

Did you run across alternative licensure? Many states (Arkansas is one) have methods for acquiring a license without formal "education " degrees. I used the Arkansas program to change careers: lawyer to teacher. I am in my 7th year at Eureka Springs. I hold a standard 7-12 language arts and social studies license. I teach both to 8th graders.

The program here required me to pass Praxis tests in my content areas, attend two summer training sessions, attend two years of monthly weekend training sessions, have a mentor, pass a comprehensive test on teaching methodology, and pass an additional Praxis in which I was observed teaching by a specially licensed, very experienced teacher. During the two years in the program I held a special license and taught every day at full pay rate.

If any thing I have mentioned leads you to more questions, PM me.

Good luck.