advice anyone?

[Professor S]

If I were either of you I would steer clear of teaching until the whole mess started with No Child Left Behind is settled. Right now teacher burnout is at an all time high and qualified teachers are leaving the field with an incredible distaste for public education.

I'd go into the bureaucratic nightmare that is my attempt to get certified in PA, but that would take about an hour to write. Lets just leave it at this:

If you aren't going to try and get your cert as an undergrad, don't bother. By the time you get you certification, none of your undergrad courses will count for shit. I was told I would have to retake 90% of my undergrad courses in my specialization, and I graduated from a MUCH better school than the one making those demands of me (where I had a 3.9+ GPA at the time).

Honestly, get into adult/professional education. Its exploding as a part of industry. Thats where I am now and I couldn't be happier. I'm encouraged to use bleeding-edge educational techniques, develop new and creative classes and I reach an active and eager audience. Also, I'm paid much better and treated much better than a public educator.

[KillerGremlin]

Originally Posted by Professor S

Honestly, get into adult/professional education. Its exploding as a part of industry. Thats where I am now and I couldn't be happier. I'm encouraged to use bleeding-edge educational techniques, develop new and creative classes and I reach an active and eager audience. Also, I'm paid much better and treated much better than a public educator.

Do you want to elaborate on adult/professional education? Is that the equivalent of teaching as a college professor, or is it something completely different that I haven't heard much of because I'm a product of America's incredibly flawed education system. I'd be the first so sign up for something involving new and creative ways to reach students as I personally feel that the current education system has a lot to be desired.

[Professor S]

Originally Posted by KillerGremlin

Do you want to elaborate on adult/professional education? Is that the equivalent of teaching as a college professor, or is it something completely different that I haven't heard much of because I'm a product of America's incredibly flawed education system. I'd be the first so sign up for something involving new and creative ways to reach students as I personally feel that the current education system has a lot to be desired.

Your students would be adult professionals working for either a company with an internal training department, or a training company that is hired by a company to train their employees.

In my case, I teach Realtors how to market properties, maintain client relationships, etc. I also design and run our internal leadership program that involved teaching about generational identities, work and life management and even Eastern philosophy.

Its not quite as idealistic as public education, but its much more creative and the methods we get to use are great. Right now I'm converting all of our traditional classes to web-based "radio show" formats and moving the rest of the classes from Learning 1.0 to 1.5 and 2.0. Our classes now resemble group conversations, workshops and even gamerooms rather than lectures. And there IS NO TESTING as it is accepted in adult education that testing accomplishes NOTHING.

But my favorite part is the freedom to innovate and be creative. Read a journal article on a new methodology on Monday, start incorporating it on Tuesday. Its amazing what you can accomplish in a short amount of time when the chains are off.

[KillerGremlin]

Originally Posted by BreakABone

That was an awful freshman year. I just wasn't having fun in doing what I was doing.

Engineers have a running joke that you'll never really have fun taking your classes. It's a "love hate" major. I waited 2 years hoping that it would all "click," and it hasn't. I kept telling myself, wait just one more semester and you'll start enjoying yourself. The classes I have had the most fun in so far have been my English, Psychology and Philosophy class. This semester has been the final straw; I discovered that I really dislike programming. Previously, I wasn't too fond of my Math and Engineering classes, but coming to the realization that I also hate programming...well, my major is comprised of Math classes, Engineering classes, and Programming classes.

Originally Posted by Jonbo298

Yeah, taking Calculus classes as a pre-req before getting into the course will suck but I'll manage. It won't be so bad in the end. As someone else said, I'd rather have a decent paying job that I enjoy, then a high paying job I hate. Once you lose that high paying job or quit, you'll most likely take a paycut since you never liked what you did in the first place, maybe starting back near the bottom, depending.

I liked single-variable Calc enough, but all the multi-variable stuff has been a little too abstract and dry for me. Finding tangent planes and tangent vectors for abstract functions in three-space is mind numbing. I considered meteorology at one point, but I think weather is more of something I enjoy reading about and just observing in person. If you go for a job in meteorology you should go do storm chasing or something. But do whatever you enjoy. I made the mistake of trying to stick out this major despite having some major doubts first semester freshman year. It's a minor setback to hopefully doing something I enjoy.