[email protected] wrote: > A friend writes below. > > > have another friend who's a professor of Biology at a university who no > longer works at that university (he resigned in emotional distress) > who's now out looking for a job in high schools... He has a PhD and 16 > plus years of experience as a prof. > > And he hasn't found a job in a high school? Frank. That's scary.
Not so sure about that. Requirements for high school teachers, particularly in public schools, are quite different from requirements on a college prof. In particular you need to be a certified teacher to teach in most (public) high schools; you do not in order to teach in most colleges, including the top high-prestige schools. Teacher's colleges can grant you a teaching degree; general technical and liberal arts colleges generally don't. The average MIT or Harvard professor isn't qualified to teach in the average public high school, because they haven't got a teaching certificate. As an example, here's a summary of the requirements to teach in an Ontario public high school (requirements in state high schools in the U.S. vary but aren't all that different from this): > To teach in a publicly funded school in Ontario you need an Ontario > teaching certificate from the Ontario College of Teachers. To obtain a > teaching certificate you will normally need an undergraduate degree, and > one year of teacher training. Teacher training is available at Ontario > universities offering the Bachelor of Education program. So your friend will need to go back to school for (at least) another year to qualify as a high school teacher in most school districts, because he very probably lacks a BE and a teaching certificate. Furthermore a college values a PhD very highly; a high school doesn't. PhD's get more money and aren't any better than masters degrees in a high school classroom, so why would they want them? The term "overqualified" is very relevant here. > And I > have another friend who's been let go from the university as an adjunct > professor without tenure. He taught music part time. Now he's playing > the piano in bars. > > Oh, what a world. I think our economy has irrevocably changed and we > just haven't realized it yet. I do not believe we will come out of this > recession. I believe it is a permanent recession, a new economy, and we > must tailor our lives to fit it. >
