Profoundly Gifted/Troubled

1. Next year I will be teaching at a school described as "serving profoundly gifted students" and it's going to be an interesting transition for me. Ryan once commented how we should be careful about not letting our occupations define us as individuals, which I think is a wise goal that I could use some work on. Being an educator tends to be a large part of who I am.

Though The Davidson Academy is a public charter school, I definitely feel like I'm leaving public education and I have some mixed emotions about it..like I'm leaving the front lines of the battle. On the one hand I think I've always been a bit more proud than I should be of the fact that I chose to teach when I'm confident that I could've handled medical or law school or some other more prestigious field. Most people who are smart enough to be great teachers can make a lot more money elsewhere, so the result is plenty of mediocre ones. But I would make the sacrifice I told myself. After all, money doesn't equal happiness right? And I would be making a real difference in the lives of our youth right?

Well I'm not leaving public education for much of a better financial situation, but now I will be serving a much smaller clientele (there are about 100 students at the school), and I'm not likely to inspire a child to go to college who wouldn't have otherwise. Having classes of 6-8 kids with IQs of 150+ sounds all too enjoyable, like a teaching utopia. But where's the personal sacrifice in that? I guess maybe now I'll see my job more as just a job and can leave my magnanimous snobbery behind. On the other hand I'm already starting to feel like I'm sort of better than other teachers because I will be teaching superior students. They wouldn't trust just anyone with these kids I tell myself. I must be something special right? I guess this pride thing is hard to kick.

In the end I'm just very happy to have a more stable job, and I'm pretty freaking excited to teach in such an ideal setting.


2. Public education is profoundly troubled. Granted all the budget cuts might make for leaner, more efficient institutions, but attracting talented individuals into education will be next to impossible. Add to what was already a hard sell the pitch that you're job will not be guaranteed for more than a year and your on the job performance will have absolutely no bearing on whether you are kept on. There were already teacher shortages before the recession (particularly in math, science, and special ed), which we don't hear about anymore because we're consigned to the fact that swelling class sizes are inevitable. But as our population and economy grow in the future I think these shortages will reach crisis levels as no one going to college presently will want to touch the profession. The crisis will then be averted by hiring any old Joe Schmo to teach calculus. Like I said, public education is in for some pretty rough times.