Age 41 - Interview #2
It appears the assignment is for me to talk about the first career I had when I first entered the workforce, rather than my current career, right? If so here goes.
1. High School English Teacher
2. 10 years
3. Taught 9-12 English and drama
4. Taught 6 sections of high school English in a small school district
5. 55 employees
6. Daily, I made the decisions on what to teach and how to teach it, although the principal and board really determined the teaching duties and such.
7. Principal occasionally dropped by the room (2-3 times per year)
8. Inside
9. Quite a bit of individual freedom within the job as long as I was there and teaching kids, little or no freedom to vary the workday schedule itself.
10. Close relationship. Everyone got along and worked as a team really well.
11. Health and life insurance, sick days, personal days, 3 month summer vacation, Spring and Christmas breaks, snow days, 8 hour workdays.
12. Bachelors degree, formal licensure testing, internship (student teaching)
13. 3/4
14. In my school, there were only 2 out of 55 who were not white
15. Local/state government (public education)
16. We do more and more intensive drills (fire, tornado, terrorism, etc), we now have latex gloves and face shields in case kids get cut or sick, we do more locking of doors and more close monitoring of who is in the halls since 9/11, we have more strict driving on campus regulations and monitor them more closely, kids have assigned seats on busses now, janitors wear gloves and coveralls when cleaning restrooms
17. Teachers have much more acccoutability with all the new student testing that is done (before it really didn't much matter how or what you taught as long as you were doing something in your area when someone dropped in). Teachers now are subject to drug and alcohol testing. Teachers cannot bring tobacco on campus (the teachers lounge used to be a smoky gas chamber that you couldn't even see through). Teachers have to take more tests and do mentoring before they cen become licensed now.
18. Our policy manuals now address things such as sexual identity, bullying, harassment, etc on these grounds between administrators:teachers, teachers: administrators, teachers:teachers, students:students, teachers:students, and students:teachers. Much more attention is paid to race and religion discrimination laws than when I first started - my school used to not hire people if they were were not some kind of Christian religion. This was an unwritten policy, but a very real one. I was asked about my own religion when I was being interviewed years ago.
19. In the United States, the world of work has become more technology based in every career that I have worked in, which has made manual labor much less physically demanding than in years past. Even farm laborers have technological tools to assist them with their jobs (including air conditioned tractors). We currently stress technology education in every subject area in school so that students will be ready for the workforce. Whether they are keying in orders at McDonalds, becoming a business manager, or preparing to work the next automated hog farm, they must be technology literate. This is something that was not even stressed when I first started teaching in 1993.
