How to get a teaching job?

August 9, 2016 2:03 AM

Couple of masters degrees, experience. How to be a teacher/professor now?

I would like to teach-at a college/university, community college or school. I have an MBA, another masters degree and 1 year college teaching experience (part time). I also have some brand name companies on my resume. What I do not have: teacher certifications and frankly don't think that is going to add value to my resume arsenal, teaching recommendations. So how would you go about using your education and experience to teach? The goal is to do something I like, adds value to society, but not let work consume all my time (unlike a 9 to 5 job).

posted by anonymous to Work & Money (18 answers total)

You could be a part-time adjunct like you were before.

Any full-time teaching job, done well, will consume at least as much time as a 9-5. For your first few years it will be much, much more than that.
posted by goodbyewaffles at 2:46 AM on August 9, 2016 [7 favorites]

The goal is to do something I like, adds value to society, but not let work consume all my time (unlike a 9 to 5 job).

Is the goal also to earn enough to live on? Because that's not going to happen if you are teaching part time. In most fields you also aren't going to get teaching work at a university level anyway without a phd, but with an mba and some big name companies on your resume you might be able to get adjuncting work in business schools. Probably not a full time gig though. And if you do get a full time gig, you will be working far more than 9-5.
posted by lollusc at 3:39 AM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

Would you be interested in doing GMAT/GRE prep? That would be my best suggestion for a job that lets you work <40 hours a week, is somewhat fulfilling, and still comfortable. It can be a bit feast/famine, though.
posted by superlibby at 4:03 AM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think your best bet is adjuncting at community colleges, but that is not going to provide a livable wage - especially not if you don't want to work more than a 9-5 job. Depending on what field your MA is in, and where you look, you might be able to get a job teaching at a private school and then earn your teaching credentials/certifications on the job. I have a friend with an MA in anthropology who's now teaching middle school math at a Catholic school in California, without having gotten another MA in teaching. However, he also works far more than 9-5.

It might be best to adjunct to teach one class a semester while also maintaining a regular full-time job so you make enough money to live on and have things like health insurance.
posted by ChuraChura at 4:22 AM on August 9, 2016

Depend a lot on what grade level you want to teach. I believe that here in CT, you can teach K-12 for three years based on life experience but after that the requirements for certs and passing tests kicks in for real. (This may be obsolete, or limited, or juot plain wrong.)

I know a guy who was a lawyer but who want to try teaching history. He attended classes to get whatever qualifications were required and got a job at the local HS. He quit in three days because of the merciless way new teachers are treated, I.e. a complete lack of support.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:23 AM on August 9, 2016

Veteran public school teacher here, nominated as Teacher of the Year in my state.

If you don't have teaching credentials, you're not qualified to teach public/private schools. You shouldn't teach at public or private school.

There's a misnomer that if a person is good in whatever professional field, this means they can teach about this field. This is pretty far from the truth.

Teachers don't go to school and get advanced degrees to learn more about Math or English or whatever our specialities are; we go to school to learn how to teach.

A lot of becoming a good teacher is on-the-ground training, but that's AFTER you've learned several years worth of pedagogy and good practice and even then, many new teachers quit after their first few years because the work is far harder than they imagined.

So thinking you can suddenly teach in a private or public school because it'll be not as demanding as a 9-5 is a massively gigantic misperception. It's a helluva lot harder than that and you're not qualified to teach.

You're going to work a LOT more than 40 hours a week as a good teacher; even seasoned veterans regularly work up to 8 most nights and on weekends.

*It's possible private schools will hire you; this still doesn't mean you should teach. I can't speak to what happens at higher level teaching.
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 5:37 AM on August 9, 2016 [21 favorites]

For all intents and purposes, you can't be a professor. You don't have a PhD. Adjuncting is the way to go buy you won't be able to support yourself because the pat is crap. You will also be competing with people with PhDs.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:11 AM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

Something like Teach for America/Australia/UK etc might be up your alley, you get into teaching a lot quicker, it's kind of an apprenticeship of teaching. I like a lot of the TFA people who are my colleagues but I have some concerns about the ideology and the program. The downside is that you are studying and teaching at the same time. Oh and you tend to get shipped to 'hard to staff' schools.

Telling teachers things like 'it must be so nice finishing at 3:30' or 'I wish I had school holidays' makes us grumpy because not only is it far from the truth (more like 8-6 plus weekend work plus holiday work) these ideas are used as excuses to tell us we aren't working hard enough (just look at those test results!) and to pay us less.

Teaching is an annoying profession in that everyone has been in a classroom (as a student) and so feels like they have expert understanding of education.

You can make a difference to the world, and teaching is one way. But if you don't want to give up the cushy 9-5 and also get the qualifications you need to do this job properly, then maybe you could look at otger options.

I don't want to discourage you if teaching is truly what you want to do- it is an awesome and rewarding profession. But it's hard work too, getting there and also to do it, and you need to be realistic about that.
posted by freethefeet at 6:27 AM on August 9, 2016 [4 favorites]

Teacher certifications are more or less absolutely required except at private schools you wouldn't want to teach at. Teacher certifications are totally irrelevant to community college or university.

You are extraordinarily unlikely to get a permanent job teaching at a ba-granting school without a terminal degree. PhDs are not generally formally required for community colleges but depending on what you want to teach you might or might not be in direct competition with people with PhDs. However, most permanent jobs will also be full-time.

You can continue to adjunct as long as you want to and the school wants you to. But you can expect to receive $1-4K/course and no benefits at all unless it happens to be a union shop.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:12 AM on August 9, 2016

Some things you may want to know about college teaching:
Depending where you live, the college teaching market may be saturated with PhD holders and one with an MA wouldn't have a great chance of getting a spot, even for adjuncting.
In my experience, full time with benefits teaching positions at community colleges are rare and often come with a lot of administrative work.
Many community colleges will be required to do a competitive search for any full time position and even if you are their best adjunct, you may have competition in the competitive search.
Full time college teaching may mean teaching 4-6 classes per semester. Between physically being in the classroom and grading/admin, this will be more than 40 hours a week, many of them on your feet. Yes the schedule is more flexible, but it is a lot of work and I've seen many people burn out from this.
Full time faculty, in the US, are often on 9 month contracts. This means that one needs to actively save to cover the other 3 months of the year.
posted by k8t at 7:13 AM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm no expert but I think the absence of certifications will hold you back in the K-12 arena while your lack of PhD will keep you out of the running for jobs at colleges or universities. My mother in law has been a teacher's aide for special needs kindergarten students for 10+ years. She can't become a teacher without an advanced degree in teaching.

I take it you're not interested in pursuing a doctoral degree which basically rules out college and university teaching gigs. You can find a fast-track path to a teaching certification with something like Teach for America. If you want to teach STEM, there are programs to help you quickly move through the certification process.

Alternately, maybe you can take a broader view of what you mean by teaching. Someone above mentioned GRE/GMAT test prep. You can tutor. You can also pursue instruction opportunities with less formal organizations. You could become an instructor with General Assembly or something similar. You can look into becoming involved with job training and placement programs in your community and help people with resumes and getting the skills they need to pursue gainful employment. That's a little more nebulous but it's probably pretty rewarding.
posted by kat518 at 7:28 AM on August 9, 2016

Side note: as others have addressed the idea that teaching is generally more arduous than your typical 9-to-5, I'll point out that saying you want to teach but you don't want to get a teaching certification is not terribly far off from saying you want to be a lawyer but don't want to get a JD. Sure, there are ways to do that but not many and it's a little insulting, both to people who earned their certifications and people who did not, to think you can skip that pesky certification nonsense and just start teaching.
posted by kat518 at 7:36 AM on August 9, 2016 [12 favorites]

To follow up on the test prep suggestion... I worked at a test prep center for years. I came in to teach LSAT classes based on a high LSAT score and eventually moved into SAT/GRE/GMAT/etc. Class teaching and tutoring. I did have an old high ACT score, but at the time I hadn't taken any of these tests.
At the big companies, the classroom teaching is fairly scripted and once you learn the techniques for taking the test, they're fairly transferable to other tests.
Tutoring was far more difficult. Instead of teaching how to take a test, I was more often teaching remedial math or reading skills. I was not qualified to do this in the least. Also a non-insignificant portion of the tutoring clients had learning disabilities that I was doubly unqualified to work with.
But, more to the point, every center I ever worked at was pretty desperate for tutors that were willing to work flexible hours. Classes are almost exclusively in the evenings and weekends but tutoring clients frequently want after school (for kids) or daytime tutoring. However, one needs to prove themselves a good classroom teacher before tutoring is offered up as a possibility.
At every center I was at, there were one or two people who were tutoring nearly full time, if not more than full time. At that time we were allowed to log one hour of prep for every hour of tutoring at half our normal rate. And if you had a new test or a new version of the instructor book, you could get 20 hours of prep hours at half rate. Add a few tutoring clients on top of that and you have a flexible well paying job with no benefits. These were all people going through the center so they didn't have to deal with the processing of money (thankfully!) or marketing themselves to potential clients. The cut the center takes was probably worth it to them in terms of less work.
However, as far as making a difference in the traditional sense, in general, test prep and especially tutoring is helping the privileged get a leg up. I had a hard time with that aspect.
posted by k8t at 8:43 AM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

In some states you can do an alternate route to teaching at the elementary it high school level if you don't have a teaching degree. This process involves passing some exams and also getting X hours of coursework under your belt. You should check the state requirements for wherever it is you want to teach. I know people who have done this and getting that alternate route certification isn't the easiest and once you get it you are still competing with others with more traditional degrees in education. I know so many teachers and all of them work an insane amount during the week- way way more than a 9-5, and they get so much shit dumped on them from their administrative staff and parents and the community. So if you want something without extra work teaching is definitely not for you. And that's ok- this isn't a judgement. I made this same assessment on myself years ago when I was thinking of switching careers and I knew I didn't want to do all the extra work and get no appreciation for it. I think you really gotta love teaching to go that route nowadays. Anyway.

As for college level- yeah you'll be competing with people with PhDs. There are so many of them out of work and trying to get into academia right now. It's not impossible for you but will be an uphill battle. And if you get an adjunct position the pay is usually complete crap.

Tutoring is really easy to get into so you can always fall back on that if your other stuff doesn't work out. Good luck.
posted by FireFountain at 8:45 AM on August 9, 2016 [1 favorite]

FYI here's an example of an alternate route certification program for New Jersey.

Without that or a traditional degree you can't teach anything but maybe a private school in that state. From what I understand other states are similar but you'll have to check. I will tell you from a friend's experience that went the private school route without a certification- he got like no money. The pay was so laughably low and he STILL had the way more then 9-5 job hours and all the other shit.
posted by FireFountain at 8:56 AM on August 9, 2016

What do you want to teach? I have known some people with a similar resume - more corporate - that got into adjunct work teaching some flavor of business/professional/corporate writing. But as others said, it's not steady work and it can take a long time to get a lucky break.

Some colleges have programs where older adults can take cheap classes that are taught by community members as a hobby thing. You might try that to boost your teaching credentials. Again, I know adjuncts who have done this as a supplemental thing. I think it pays even less, but it's a less competitive way to get some teaching experience.
posted by nakedmolerats at 9:02 AM on August 9, 2016

Former adjunct here, and agree on all points. Good teachers spend far more time than people think they do (it isn't just showing up to the classroom, it's prep and grading as well as office hours, and maintaining current knowledge in your field) working. So it's not an "easy" job if it's done well. And who wants to go into something to be bad at it?

Tale of two former colleagues (I quit and went into health care, which offers a lot of opportunities to teach but have a normal salary instead of trying to pick up a class or three every few months), both with quals similar to yours: Dan teaches at a single campus. He is lucky to get two classes a term and barely scrapes by, going long periods without a car, not having internet at home, having a pay as you go mobile, getting increasingly bitter about his lot in life, etc. Chris works at two campuses and in addition learned ASL, so he interprets. He fills up his schedule with tutoring, but in reality with the travel and odd hours at most campuses, basically has two full time jobs. He, however, has a very stable income and a home now.

Tl; dr: don't do this thinking you can work 20 hours a week and make a great living. It is a punishing system for part timers. You will have to work very hard to make a go of this without a PhD.
posted by OneSmartMonkey at 9:25 AM on August 9, 2016 [2 favorites]

Echoing do not do K-12, even if you rethink the value of certification (which you should if you truly want to learn how to teach effectively), because you will never work 9-5. (7am-6pm was the most common schedule at my school where teachers were largely awesome and dedicated professionals. Also through in working a few weeknights + Saturday or Sunday most weeks for grading, too.)

My first year of teaching, I averaged 80 hr weeks. My 2nd and 3rd years, I averaged 60 hr weeks. My final year, I got it down to 55 hrs and then left the classroom because I was soooo done.
posted by smirkette at 11:11 AM on August 9, 2016