Questions for Current PhD Applicants

[lindsey372]

But OP is now trying to dissuade everyone else from doing it.....seems silly. Again, I'm not sure I understand the financial hardship argument post-PhD. Go. Get. A. Job. You are employable outside of academia. 

[__________________________]

9 minutes ago, lindsey372 said:

You are employable outside of academia. 

I feel like this statement depends on a lot of variable factors.  If OP regrets going to a get a Ph.D., OP probably figures her/his case is not exceptional.  I'm sure most people with Ph.D.s are employed in some capacity, but I'm sure there are plenty trapped in unfulfilling/depressing jobs or scraping along the poverty line.  

You can say "just go teach high school" (and I have) but that's not really a unilaterally great thing to tell someone.  Teaching high school (well) takes at least as much passion and dedication to do as doing a Ph.D., and in some places (like my city) it's pretty precarious and extremely exploitative work in public education; the alternative being to be lucky enough to find a job teaching the children of the 1% or working in a charter school system that sustains itself by leeching off infrastructure in low income, high crime neighborhoods at the expense of public education and creating a small highly paternalistic industry of piping kids into 4-year colleges with no regard for whether that's the best option for those kids (let alone preparing them to stay in those schools). 

I have no data to back this up, but I'd imagine that for a lot of places and job markets, having six extra years of school with only some experience TA'ing and leading a class or two at a univeristy (if that) wouldn't put you in a dramatically better place than coming out with a BA (which sucks in a lot of places).  

[lindsey372]

11 hours ago, unræd said:

 It's a job, and the minute we treat it less like a job that deserves (like all labor!) fair compensation and instead imagine it as special and set apart, as some quasi-monastic pursuit of ill-defined capital-K "Knowledge" that imagines financial hardship as somehow constitutive of the scholarly project, is the minute people think they don't need to pay their students/adjuncts/faculty well because, hey, what the hell do they do all day but sit around and talk about poetry and doesn't everyone know there's no money in the humanities and isn't that what they signed up for, anyway?

fair enough, however a bit dramatic at the end. 

what I arguing however, is that pursuing a PhD is about something more than "getting a job":

(1) unlike many other professions, studying in the humanities is a way of life. You do it at all hours. Anything else you are doing is tainted by the fact that you're not reading or writing. I don't know if the majority of lawyers feel this way about litigating, or the majority of surgeons wish they could perform surgery all day. While many jobs are incredibly fulfilling, reading and research are things I would hope the majority of us do on our own time for fun. In that way, the profession must be viewed differently in terms of pay-out. Are you willing to take a pay cut to do what you love? In what non-monetary ways can I measure success etc etc.

(2) It is not a "job" in the narrow sense because there are no jobs to be had. Seriously, if someone wants "a job" they are incredibly stupid if they think this path will get them one. If you're interested in jobs, go get an MBA, and read on the side. Or don't go to grad school at all. I argue that there has got to be (1) in place if you go down this path because at the end of the path all you will have is your experience and learning to show for it.

If you regret your PhD, that shows that you either are missing (1) or you did not know about the realities of (2).

 

[lindsey372]

11 hours ago, mollifiedmolloy said:

 Teaching high school (well) takes at least as much passion and dedication to do as doing a Ph.D., and in some places (like my city) it's pretty precarious and extremely exploitative work in public education; the alternative being to be lucky enough to find a job teaching the children of the 1% or working in a charter school system that sustains itself by leeching off infrastructure in low income, high crime neighborhoods at the expense of public education and creating a small highly paternalistic industry of piping kids into 4-year colleges with no regard for whether that's the best option for those kids (let alone preparing them to stay in those schools). 

I have no data to back this up, but I'd imagine that for a lot of places and job markets, having six extra years of school with only some experience TA'ing and leading a class or two at a univeristy (if that) wouldn't put you in a dramatically better place than coming out with a BA (which sucks in a lot of places).  

I totally agree it's not for everyone, but I would not call it "extremely exploitative." Is it hard work? Yes. Do you get a living wage and full benefits? Yes. Exploitation? No. 

I disagree with the way of thinking that suggests the only worthwhile gig would be teaching the top 1%. There are AMAZING and I mean AMAZING students in public school systems. I've taught sophomores who were reading David Foster Wallace, Freud, and Derrida for fun. I've witnessed students who never read for fun all of a sudden get into a book and start a ferocious discussion. You have no idea the world of awesomeness that can happen in a public school. 

Edited April 6, 2016 by lindsey372

[unræd]

44 minutes ago, lindsey372 said:

I totally agree it's not for everyone, but I would not call it "extremely exploitative." Is it hard work? Yes. Do you get a living wage and full benefits? Yes. Exploitation? No. 

I disagree with the way of thinking that suggests the only worthwhile gig would be teaching the top 1%. There are AMAZING and I mean AMAZING students in public school systems. I've taught sophomores who were reading David Foster Wallace, Freud, and Derrida for fun. I've witnessed students who never read for fun all of a sudden get into a book and start a ferocious discussion. You have no idea the world of awesomeness that can happen in a public school. 

You've misread molloy's post. He's one of the most tireless advocates here on issues of income inequality and the importance and rewards of teaching socioeconomically disadvantaged students, which he has, you know, actually done. In the phrase "the alternative being to be lucky enough to find a job teaching the children of the 1%" the "teaching the children of the 1%" percent is a bad thing, the downside to taking a more stable and financially secure job in a private school instead of a public one. Telling him what he has no idea about when you have no idea about him is, again, not the most charitable of possible responses.

Edited April 6, 2016 by unræd

[lindsey372]

The way the sentences were structured, I read the 1% gig as a lesser of two evils, but I see the misread. However, I don't think teaching HS is as dire a situation as that post painted it. 

[rising_star]

39 minutes ago, lindsey372 said:

However, I don't think teaching HS is as dire a situation as that post painted it. 

This depends on what field you'd be teaching and where you'd be working. I have many friends who teach high school. Some of them have to deal with getting pink slips at the end of each year because the district isn't sure they can afford to keep them. They then spend their summer scrambling to find another job or hoping the district will ultimately find the funds to rehire them. In some cases, this means being shuffled to a new school in the district every couple of years or having to move out of town/state altogether. I wouldn't say that's a great situation to be in, especially if you have a family or dependents. And then there's all the standardized testing-based pressure, the increasing amounts of paperwork, etc. My aunt has been complaining a lot about the latter lately because the extra paperwork is adding a couple of hours to her workday and she can't see the benefits to her students. I trust her on this because she's been teaching HS full-time for over 40 years.

[lindsey372]

@rising_star Good points, teaching can be so different depending on where you do it and what you teach. I can only speak to my experience, but from what I can gather in a measly two years of teaching English is that some districts are better than others, but I would venture that the ratio between the amount of good (by good I mean stable) districts in comparison to less stable districts is not too bad. Of all the teachers I know personally, not one of them has had to move out of town just to get a job, but then again the only towns I've taught in have been Austin and Corpus Christi (moved bc husband is in grad school). Also, not all grades are testing grades, and even within a testing grade, if you teach Pre-AP, testing is not an issue. In TX 11th and 12th grade do not take state tests, so they are entirely off the hook testing wise. And what sort of paperwork is your aunt doing that takes hours everyday? Periodically I fill out forms for ARD or spec ed meetings, but usually I am just planning for class during my conference. I have only been teaching for 2 years, and can only speak to my experience and the experience of a handful of other veteran teachers. This is in no way trying to invalidate your friend's experiences, but simply to offer mine as an alternative.

Edited April 6, 2016 by lindsey372

[displayname]

Lindsey, I'd defer to a past poster that complained about the "exploitation Olympics" (or whatever the phrase is). The point is not to say that PhDs are not privileged in certain respects, or that they are the most exploited.

More specifically,

7 hours ago, lindsey372 said:

Do you get a living wage and full benefits?

You assume that all grad students get a living wage with full benefits. This is simply not true. Benefit packages are not always "full," depending on how you define that. You also may lose these benefits if, for instance, you need to withdraw while researching abroad due to the constraints of your funding.  Finally, many schools across the "ranks" provide a salary that cannot pay the bills in the expensive cities in which the university is located.  You can absolutely accept a "fully funded" offer to a grad school and, by year 2, realize that you must earn more money to continue, pay healthcare costs out-of-pocket, etc.

[lindsey372]

@displayname the quote you use is in reference to teaching high school, not working as a grad student.

[rising_star]

7 hours ago, lindsey372 said:

I have only been teaching for 2 years, and can only speak to my experience and the experience of a handful of other veteran teachers. This is in no way trying to invalidate your friend's experiences, but simply to offer mine as an alternative.

Except that by making that statement you did invalidate the experiences of my friends and my family. If you weren't trying to, then you wouldn't have made an entire post just to refute the points I made. It's entirely possible the educational system in Texas where you've lived and worked is better financed than those in other places. In states like PA and IL where the state has taken months to pass a budget, public school teachers are in a precarious situation. The same is true of states where education budgets have been slashed. Unfortunately for my friends and family, they work in those kinds of states. And, to be fair, this has been the case for a while. See here, here, here, and here for some examples of teachers being laid off and told to apply for other jobs in the district. I'll also quote from a relevant public media blog post: "It’s tough running a school system. It’s tough being a teacher, even if you’re not getting jumped while trying to break up fights. Around this time every year, you have to wonder whether you’ll have a job in the fall. And, presumably, you have to ask yourself whether it’s worth it to try to hang in for three years when the protections of tenure kick in."

You're actually quite unwilling to see the points others have made in this thread, which is fine. I just thought that a dose of realism about what public school teaching is like would be helpful for others. For me, teaching K-12 isn't an option because it isn't what I want to do. I would rather find another line of work altogether, mostly because parents really annoy me. 

[__________________________]

Thanks unraed :).

14 hours ago, lindsey372 said:

I've taught sophomores who were reading David Foster Wallace, Freud, and Derrida for fun. I've witnessed students who never read for fun all of a sudden get into a book and start a ferocious discussion. You have no idea the world of awesomeness that can happen in a public school. 

12 hours ago, lindsey372 said:

@rising_star Good points, teaching can be so different depending on where you do it and what you teach. 

Ummm... yeah.  Hm.  This is the main thing I'm getting from reading about your experience teaching.  I was teaching in a public high school in a rust belt town with a poverty rate of 35% and a lot of issues with gang/drug related crimes and rural poverty.  And yes, I consider the job I had to be exploitative.  I had no benefits, was paid on an hourly wage for hours that only reflected a fraction of the hours I was actually working, and had very little support from administration and other teachers (including basic things like being kept informed about basic district policy).  If that's not exploitative, I'm not sure what is.  I now live on the south side of Chicago and I'm not teaching now, but I can tell you for a fact that the teacher's union and the way public education here is f***ed up.  There was a city-wide strike on Friday.  The union has very little power and the way public schools here is very top-down, with public schools getting shut down in low-income neighborhoods in favor of a charter school system that literally makes a profit off of taking students from adverse backgrounds and training them to do well on the SAT through extremely regimented, authoritarian, and paternalistic teaching methods and piping them to name-brand schools.  I don't know what it's like in Austin, but I can tell you I didn't teach kids who read Derrida.  I taught kids who were barely literate and were trying to graduate so they could get out of school system that had failed them and devote more time to supporting their families.  I taught homeless kids, kids who sold drugs, kids who were parents to their own children and/or to their younger siblings.  Since those are the types of kids who most need teachers -- good teachers, passionate teachers -- that's why I'm reticent to say that teaching is a solid "plan B."  Because it's a completely different ballgame than going to graduate school to be a literature scholar.  There's no comparison.  If you're doing it, more power to you, etc. but it sounds like your teaching situation is pretty exceptional.  I.e., not what many peoples' experience would be.

As for teaching kids of the 1%, this is a lesser of two evils teaching gig for a lot of people.  I've heard grad students on this forum and IRL talk about teaching in a prep school or a suburban district as a plan B many times.  I don't fault that route at all, but it's a different can of worms.  I still don't think it'd be a simple or smooth-as-silk transition, but yeah, actually, coming out of graduate school in literature with a Ph.D., I would think you'd be better prepared for that work than teaching at a public school like the ones near where I live now or where I was teaching.

4 hours ago, rising_star said:

 In states like PA and IL where the state has taken months to pass a budget, public school teachers are in a precarious situation.

Thank you.  That's putting it lightly.  None of this is to hate on public schools or being a teacher -- I'm a big advocate of teachers and public education, but I also support teachers' rights and supporting teachers who are passionate about doing that, not just having a plan B that they have no idea about for the event that they don't get a job in academia.  I think that's misleading.

[lindsey372]

@mollifiedmolloy @rising_star

your experiences are not invalidated if I give my own. If my experience differs, it is an alternative, not a refutation all other experiences.

Edited April 7, 2016 by lindsey372

[lindsey372]

14 hours ago, rising_star said:

If you weren't trying to, then you wouldn't have made an entire post just to refute the points I made. It's entirely possible the educational system in Texas where you've lived and worked is better financed than those in other places.

Why is giving another experience a refutation of your points? How? I assume readers here are smart enough to know that there are many different experiences one can have.....so why not give mine? 

Edited April 7, 2016 by lindsey372

[lindsey372]

9 hours ago, mollifiedmolloy said:

it sounds like your teaching situation is pretty exceptional.  I.e., not what many peoples' experience would be.

I agree that the school in Austin it was on the more exceptional side of the spectrum, however now I am in a semi-rural district outside of corpus. I teach an on grade-level (non- Pre-AP) testing grade and it is VERY different but still a positive experience in the long run and stable. I think my current job is closer to the norm and I do still believe that there are a lot of jobs like mine to be had, depending on where you live (hopefully not Chicago). If you are not getting salary and benefits, then yes, teaching ANYWHERE is exploitative. I was unfamiliar with state laws that would allow a full time teaching position to be nonsalaried. Lesson: you should all move to Texas.

[__________________________]

7 hours ago, lindsey372 said:

@mollifiedmolloy @rising_star

your experiences are not invalidated if I give my own. If my experience differs, it is an alternative, not a refutation all other experiences.

 

7 hours ago, lindsey372 said:

I agree that the school in Austin it was on the more exceptional side of the spectrum, however now I am in a semi-rural district outside of corpus. I teach an on grade-level (non- Pre-AP) testing grade and it is VERY different but still a positive experience in the long run and stable. 

I wasn't at all trying invalidate yours either (nor do I think rising_star was).  I also know people who taught in Texas and had similar experiences to mine, so I wouldn't be so quick to the draw on that.  My city literally has  *both* some of the best-ranked and most notoriously rough high schools in the country.  Public doesn't mean equal, even in the same city, county, or state.  I'm just saying you should know what you're getting into (which doesn't just mean it's "hard").  I'm just saying that just because you do a Ph.D. to teach college doesn't mean that teaching high school is the most logical alternative just because it's teaching.

Full disclosure: I was a long term substitute, and my position in some ways was sort of a legal gray area (long story), but the way I was treated and hired is reflective of the practices of similar small public schools in a state where public education has been systematically attacked for years by the Republican party (Scott Walker has no friends amongst the teachers).  It wasn't a long-term or permanent job and I wasn't properly trained.  Going into it, I had a cavalier, "well, I'll try this, there're no jobs around here and it'll be a great plan B if I don't get into grad school" kind of attitude.  It was overwhelming, emotionally draining, and exhausting.  I liked teaching and I loved my students, but I just want to point out that if you treat teaching as a "backup" or a casual job you can just pick up, I think it's not good for you or the students and in a lot of places, having a steady supply of educated middle class white young people with a "useless" degree or two (like me) as contingent labor is how public schools are forced to teach their kids.  I felt like I was a scab, a cog in a larger system treating teachers like trash.  When I was there, the state government was trying to make it easier to get a teaching license (so that in schools like mine with bad teacher retention rates, they could make a high school diploma the only prerequisite to teach high school).  If you're in a big city, I'd imagine that it's the charter schools and/or Teach For America that you'll likely be turning to as your "plan B" teaching gig and there are serious issues with that.  

There are plenty of people who choose  to be teachers as their Plan A and those peoples' careers and the sector that they work for is under attack right now in many places.  Kansas, Illinois, Louisiana, Wisconsin... the list goes on.  Texas has its own rich resume, I'm sure.  The charter school system where my partner works gives preference to people with fancy degrees in their subject areas over those who have worked hard to make a career out of teaching.  These schools do great work but they're also part of a larger trend and systemic issue that a lot of people find unsustainable and unethical.  

So I'm not saying rule out teaching, I'm just saying, if you're thinking about it, do your homework and don't rely on it like some sort of safety net back up, because its a career in its own right with its own complicated situation that isn't necessarily any better than academia.  Okay, I'm done now.  There was a perfectly decent discussion about brainstorming alt-ac stuff before I helped it devolve into this petty little pit of bickering about teaching careers.

That being said,

7 hours ago, lindsey372 said:

depending on where you live (hopefully not Chicago).

7 hours ago, lindsey372 said:

Lesson: you should all move to Texas.

[lindsey372]

16 hours ago, mollifiedmolloy said:

I was a long term substitute

I too was a long term sub before I got my certification. As I'm sure you're aware molloy (or maybe you're not) subbing and full time teaching are incredibly different experiences. For instance, I would never, ever sub again. Ever. But I would happily teach HS in a full-time/permanent position for the rest of my career.

First, subs receive, what it is now, 10/hr? 12/hr? So basically nothing and no benefits. You get no support from other teachers or admin. The only person that cares about you is the sub coordinator, and they only care about you if you don't show up. Molloy is correct, in that you are just a scab, a temporary body to fill the room while they look for certified candidates. No one cares about subs. No one. And then there's the students.... Coming into someone else's classroom, to try and continue someone else's (or the dept's) plans, with no input at all, with kids who you have not known from day-1. Ugh. I am getting bad feelings just remembering it all. Respect is a constant battle with a sub. Kids of all performance levels will challenge your authority on a daily basis. I can see why Molloy is jaded.

As a full time employee, you get....

Salary and benefits, plus a mentor teacher is assigned to you your first year, to personally check up on you and help you figure stuff out. You are in a professional learning community (PLC) with your entire department or with a grade level team where you meet (usually weekly) to plan and discuss, bounce ideas off each other, etc. If you are new to teaching your grade level team or PLC community will be your first support network, and since it is made up of other teachers, lots of whom are veterans, usually they are very eager to help you because they remember what it was like to be new to teaching. Admin usually treats you very well because they do not want to have to deal with all the discipline issues that comes with bringing in a long term sub if you decide to quit. Teachers are valuable and just like any other business, public schools do not do well with high turnover. Once you're there and they see you can do a good job, they want you to stay. Also there is the fact that you get your own classroom with your own lesson plans and with your own students who get to know you from the first day. This part is crucial. No matter how assertive you are as a sub, it will never replace being there from day 1. Kids are loyal to a fault. 

But most importantly, you get to feel as if you're a part of a team and a community.You feel valued. You never get that with subbing. Its a huge difference in quality of life. 

 

16 hours ago, mollifiedmolloy said:

I just want to point out that if you treat teaching as a "backup" or a casual job you can just pick up, I think it's not good for you or the students and in a lot of places, having a steady supply of educated middle class white young people with a "useless" degree or two (like me) as contingent labor is how public schools are forced to teach their kids.

This is true. Teaching is still a very demanding job, but I do think that people who have advanced degrees in the humanities are well-suited for it. And if you have an advanced degree, you are not stranger to hard work, I would assume. And, if you're using the skills you learned with those degrees to inform your career as a secondary teacher, they cease to be useless, IMO.

 

16 hours ago, mollifiedmolloy said:

So I'm not saying rule out teaching, I'm just saying, if you're thinking about it, do your homework

Well said. But I would hope doing one's homework would mean getting advice about the profession from people who have actually taught as a full time faculty member. Even then, people can exaggerate the negative and positive aspects of anything. And if anyone loves to complain, its teachers. The only real way to know if the profession is right for you is to try it yourself. It usually takes only a year to get an alternative certification. If you hate it, you hate it. 

 

On 4/7/2016 at 10:30 PM, mollifiedmolloy said:

 I was teaching in a public high school

If there are any prospective teachers out there, I would be wary of advice from people with only sub experience (though they are acting in good faith). While applicable in some respects, its a skewed picture overall of the profession. 

 

 

Edited April 8, 2016 by lindsey372

[rising_star]

1 hour ago, lindsey372 said:

As a full time employee, you get....

Salary and benefits, plus a mentor teacher is assigned to you your first year, to personally check up on you and help you figure stuff out. You are in a professional learning community (PLC) with your entire department or with a grade level team where you meet (usually weekly) to plan and discuss, bounce ideas off each other, etc. If you are new to teaching your grade level team or PLC community will be your first support network, and since it is made up of other teachers, lots of whom are veterans, usually they are very eager to help you because they remember what it was like to be new to teaching. Admin usually treats you very well because they do not want to have to deal with all the discipline issues that comes with bringing in a long term sub if you decide to quit. Teachers are valuable and just like any other business, public schools do not do well with high turnover. Once you're there and they see you can do a good job, they want you to stay. Also there is the fact that you get your own classroom with your own lesson plans and with your own students who get to know you from the first day. This part is crucial. No matter how assertive you are as a sub, it will never replace being there from day 1. Kids are loyal to a fault. 

But most importantly, you get to feel as if you're a part of a team and a community.You feel valued. You never get that with subbing. Its a huge difference in quality of life.

It's important to keep in mind that this too is school and district specific. Many of my friends were not given the support you describe when they started teaching for any number of reasons, many of which were financial. As for the salary, it's worth noting that the starting salary for some of my friends was in the low $30s. How good the benefits are also varies by district.

[__________________________]

3 minutes ago, lindsey372 said:

First, subs receive, what it is now, 10/hr? 12/hr? So basically nothing and no benefits. You get no support from other teachers or admin. The only person that cares about you is the sub coordinator, and they only care about you if you don't show up. 

This wasn't at all my experience.  I made 20/hr, but anyone who's taught knows that hourly wage is an inadequate way to pay a teacher.  I was a long term sub, which is different from being a sub.  I didn't answer to a sub coordinator, but to the vice principal and department chair and was treated, in terms of responsibilities, like a regular teacher. I taught and designed classes on my own, had students from the beginning of my classes until the end.  I was part of a PLC.  It was essentially like being an adjunct, and I was treated just like a first year teacher, minus the benefits.  I also took on the same subbing responsibilities (on top of my full-time teaching load) as full-time teachers, since the school I worked at had shortages.  It sounds like worked with kids in a rougher area, but I may have actually been in a better position than you.  I wasn't salaried but was essentially making  around $36k a year if I did summer school and maybe chose to take some more subbing gigs.  Which in my town was a very solid income, especially being a single person with a B.A. (in a town where having a welding certification or a license to operate heavy machinery is much more value than a college degree).  I also could have become salaried in the next couple of years if I had stuck with it (actually, I would have had to: in order to keep the job, I would have had to started making progress towards a masters, which would have in turn made me a strong candidate for a salaried union job).

23 minutes ago, lindsey372 said:

If there are any prospective teachers out there, I would be wary of advice from people with only sub experience (though they are acting in good faith). While applicable in some respects, its a skewed picture overall of the profession. 

That's fine.  The perspective I was offering was as someone who did the kind of work that one would do if they were trying to get into the profession of teaching coming out of a higher education setting without previous experience doing so (so as a "plan B").  My experience is similar to someone who would have done Teach For America, for example, or gotten into working through a charter school (though that, admittedly, would have been much nicer).  In terms of the workload, though, I was reminded by other teachers on a regular basis that this was normal stuff for a first year teacher.  "Trial by fire" is what they always said.  If I had wanted to, I could have stayed, taught summer school, kept teaching as a long term sub and gotten my MAT and made a career out of it.  I was making more money there than I am off my graduate school stipend.  I got to know a lot of teachers and kept up with education politics in the state, which are bad.  Part of the point I was making politically is that my job and the way I was worked is in many ways indicative of a larger trend of devaluing the overall profession of teaching.  BUT: I totally could have continued what I was doing and turned it into a career; I had a great working relationship with the other teachers and with the administrators at the school.  But I also felt overwhelmed and felt the value of taking the professionalizing path that most of the other teachers had taken; if anything, it made me value the profession more.

Nobody here was trying to undermine the profession.  I just know a lot of people who try to get into teaching the way that I did and think that it's part of a larger systemic problem that is neither good for students or potential teachers.  If you want to teach, you should go get a MAT and do student teaching and understand that's it's a profession in its own right just like being a professor, but with its own professionalization tracks and methods.  That's literally the only point I was trying to make, because I've known way too many people do similar things as me, either through subbing or Teach For America or similar programs and I think those routes are bad for the profession (both from reflecting on my own experience, talking to others' with similar experiences, and talking to and working alongside a lot of career teachers).  I've met too many people who went by the logic of "oh, I can just go teach" and ended up in really shitty places, but that doesn't mean I'm jaded about teaching itself.  If you want a job in a charter school and you have a Ph.D., that's not a bad option at all, and you would get benefits and a solid middle class salary.  I've suggested that route elsewhere; and there's a whole sector of education designed for people like that, but understand that it's in a precarious relationship with unioned career teachers in public schools.  

All I'm suggesting is the same thing people suggest when they say you shouldn't adjunct, because its exploitative for you and perpetuates a system that exploits others.  It's obviously more complicated than that, and I think teaching in grade school has more mobility than that, but what I see here and elsewhere is a movement in a direction that is undermining and making obsolete the teaching experience that @lindsey372 is describing.  Look at what's happening in New Orleans (where traditional public schools have been eliminated altogether).  Look at how Rahm Emmanuel treats education.  See Scott Walker's philosophy on education (he's been greatly expanding voucher systems, and has been encouraging more "self-sufficiency" in public education, both in primary schools and universities, with the result of undermining teachers unions and making schools resemble vocational schools more and more at the expense of the arts and humanities).  See, like, everything that's wrong with the state of Kansas.  But in some places, these people are gutting public education and moving towards a system that is actually very good for unemployed academics like us.  Education in general is in a weird place in this country, and people should't act like working in public education as some sunny alternative to academia (which, as has been exhaustively discussed in our beloved "ponzi scheme" thread, ain't so great in many important ways).  Are there more opportunities for teaching in high schools?  Undeniably, yes.  But it's also it's own complicated world and it's worth researching before treating it like a safety net.  Though it should be said, that if you want to be a teacher or be in education making a salary and getting benefits and don't have a degree in education, Chicago is actually one of the best cities in the country for you.  But it's in the vanguard of a larger national trend in educational practice and policy that most unioned, public school teachers find extremely disturbing, and that isn't something you'd know if you're just coming into the situation as your -- totally solid -- "plan B."  It's a great option for many of us, but it also helps lead to the undermining of jobs like what @lindsey372 has.  

I've encouraged people to teach many times, and still do, just with caveats because it's not for everyone and the job market can either have issues that some people would take issue with ethically or, in some places, just simply be a bad idea because of the state politics that are gutting the education system (see: Kansas).

[lindsey372]

39 minutes ago, mollifiedmolloy said:

Education in general is in a weird place in this country, and people should't act like working in public education as some sunny alternative to academia (which, as has been exhaustively discussed in our beloved "ponzi scheme" thread, ain't so great in many important ways).

Since I, and maybe others who don't live on this forum, have not followed the ponzi scheme thread, reactivating the conversation here, with new perspectives, has been edifying (for me at least) and hopefully worthwhile since secondary teaching is such a common plan B.  

Edited April 8, 2016 by lindsey372

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11 minutes ago, lindsey372 said:

Since I, and maybe others, have not followed the ponzi scheme thread, reactivating the conversation here, with new perspectives, has been edifying (for me at least) and hopefully worthwhile since secondary teaching is such a common plan B.  

Word.  One of the good things about both academics and teachers (and other jobs that really do value being as educated as you can) is that they can recognize the value of criticizing their own field without undermining it.  I assume that you're a licensed teacher making a living doing that, working in a public school system that sounds like is working well and doing what it was set out to do.  Which is fantastic.  But I just worry about the state of public education in many places, especially in places where there are big issues with economic inequality and segregation and where those socioeconomic issues are perpetuated alongside the undermining of public education in ways that can actually be beneficial for people looking for a plan B, but not necessarily in a way that would be savory to a lot of otherwise well-intentioned young educated people trying to be a positive force in their cities and make a decent living wage.  It's more complicated than "this is bad" or "this is great" though.  I do think people should look into teaching as an alt-ac career (as lindsey372 said, having that kind of knowledge and background can be very valuable in a school), but, like anything else, should make steps towards that early instead of taking it for granted as a natural "Plan B" (which is an attitude I've heard people in my program say: I think there are real problems with both the attitude of TFA vets I've heard talk about teaching as a form of martyrdom and those who say they'll just go get a teaching gig in a high school if they can't find a job in academia).  :-)