Jim Henderson wrote:
> Ack.  Good luck with the new career - don't they require a teaching 
> certificate to teach there?

I'll answer all of the questions here.

Florida requires that teachers eventually be certified, but if one has a 
bachelor's degree, the state will grant a certificate of eligibility for 
the field in which the degree is held.  A public school can then hire 
that person as a teacher.

After that point, the teacher has to complete a bunch of courses (which 
essentially duplicate the training required for certification), at which 
point a professional certificate is granted.

I entered teaching under this system.  When I was being interviewed for 
the job, I told them, and they understood, that I had never taught in a 
school setting.  I also told them, and they clearly did not understand, 
that since I knew nothing about conducting a classroom, that they should 
make no assumptions about what I know, and that they should not assume 
that I would recognize that a problem even existed, let alone how to 
prevent or fix such problems.

Because I knew so little about managing a classroom, I made a number of 
missteps which caused the students to regard my classroom as a place 
where there were no rules.  In February I was told that I had about a 
month to get the students behaving according to expectations, or I would 
not be retained for the following year.  I had already asked if he had 
seen such a classroom situation, and if so, how it had been resolved, 
and he hadn't given me an answer.  I asked the same question again, and 
again he could give no answer, which is a strong indication that the 
problem, as far as this batch of students is concerned, is probably 
unsolvable.  After another two weeks of trying to get the little dears 
to simply be quiet while I was lecturing, I decided that keeping the job 
wasn't worth the effort, and started seeking work elsewhere.

Throughout all of this it didn't help matters that whenever a parent 
complained about what was going on in class, the principal did not even 
make a token effort to verify that the complaint had any factual basis, 
and even after receiving first-hand evidence that he cannot accept such 
accounts at face value, he continued to act on complaints as if they 
were wholly reliable.  He also exhibited a pattern of ignoring anything 
I said that didn't already agree with what he already thought.  This is 
a guy who once got on my case for talking about another teacher in my 
class, but people have been talking about me behind my back for six 
months, and if he's done anything about it, he sure hasn't told me what 
it was.

Right now I am working in a job in retail sales, and I will probably 
stay there for a while until I decide what I want to do next.

Regards,
John

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