Life – Take Two: Teaching as a Second Career
Annette Wunder
ENGL 1B, Gwendolyn Ball
April 15, 2007
What if I had become a teacher when I was young? What would I need to do to
be a teacher now? These are questions I have been asking myself lately and I have
decided to find the answers. “But why?” you might ask. Why would a Forty-four year
old woman with a good job, as a senior insurance agent and trainer, want to trade in her
life for that of a middle school Social Studies teacher? I need to answer the “what if?”
question once and for all.
Since I was in Kindergarten I have wanted to teach. While other little girls were
playing house and playing Barbies, I was pretending I was in a classroom teaching. I
would “teach” my little sister, the neighborhood kids, and any stray stuffed animals or
dolls. I was sure that was my destiny. When I graduated high school and started college,
I planned on majoring in teaching. I even got a job at a local daycare/nursery school
where I usually facilitated story time and crafts. When I went to the doctor for a routine
physical required to work with small children, he found an ovarian tumor. When I found
out, at a young nineteen years old that I would not be able to have children of my own, I
could not bear being around them all day, every day. Teaching was no longer an option
for me at the time.
I had a second job working for a caterer, and my boss suggested I pursue culinary
arts. He said I had talent and was a hard worker. I moved to San Francisco and got an
associates degree in Hotel and Restaurant Operations at City College. After graduating, I
managed an ice cream shop, a deli, a pizza restaurant and a dessert café/coffee house
before I got married and moved back to the Sacramento area. I was finished with food
service. I enjoyed the people and I enjoyed training my employees, but I didn’t like
anything else about that career. I also worked for a cable television provider for thirteen
years, and looking back, I was happiest when I was the trainer. I have now been working
in the insurance industry for almost five years and have just been promoted to instructor
for policy service representatives. I realize my life keeps coming back to teaching, so I
may as well look into taking it on fully.
I wanted to start my search by talking to some people in the teaching field. So I
made a list of people to talk to and my brother-in-law actually assisted with that. He had
spent some time working for the Woodland Schools’ Department of Education, so he was
able to give me some names of administrators and teachers who I may be able to
interview.
Because I didn’t hear from my interviewees yet, I started my search by going to
the library at Sacramento State University. There, I asked the librarian at the help desk
for assistance in finding the Library of Congress Subject Headings. I compiled a list of
possible search topics and went to the computer to check the catalogue. I found this to be
very easy compared to the last time I did research in an actual library, when I had to use a
physical card catalogue. I searched for Certification of Teachers, Rating of Teachers,
Training of Teachers and Middle School Teaching.
Finding my books in the stacks was easy using the call numbers. A book by
Robert W. Maloy and Irving Seidman, The Essential Career Guide to Becoming a Middle
and High School Teacher, had a section about mid-career candidates. It gave one
explanation of the motivation for people changing careers to become teachers, saying,
“Many career changers who originally chose more prestigious or prosperous lines of
work now no longer consider profit their first priority” (Maloy & Seidman, 1999, p. 5).
This seemed like a reasonable explanation for someone entering the teaching profession
later in life, though it was a little different than my reasons. I wondered how common my
story may be.
The other book I found helpful was Meet me in the Middle: Becoming an
Accomplished Middle-Level Teacher, by Rick Wormeli. In it, Wormeli (2001) gives a list
of sixteen ways to motivate students to learn that helped give me a sense of what is
involved in teaching students, whether it be in the middle grades or those in my current
job, training adults. The list included items like “use stories, express enthusiasm for
your subject, communicate goals clearly, use games, use authentic learning and
assessment” (Wormeli, 2001, pp.7-18), to name a few. I thought this was helpful because
it solidified my perception of the difficulty of effective teaching. The book also discusses
the benefits of mentoring in the career of a new teacher to “communicate goals…get
