Why a BA is Now a Ticket to A Job in a Coffee Shop

[longship]

21. I am retired now, but I am a STEM.

BS in physics, with honors. Should have gone on, but didn't.

My last two tech jobs were at will, both at prominent tech firms. Both without benefits. Both went under.

I taught school for a while, high school mathematics. Then NCLB was put into place and administration started testing students to see if teachers were doing their jobs right. Of course, as a relative newbie, nearly all my classes were ninth grade algebra, and nearly all my students were passed on in previous grades with no regard to their competency.

The curriculum was good, and academic. But, like all the teachers of ninth grade algebra in that district, we got the blame for the poor scores from students who could not even multiply, let alone understand what algebra even meant. Regardless, we teachers were rated by the scores on the severely academic district-wide standard exams.

In my school alone, six ninth grade algebra teachers were asked to resign due to poor testing results. It pretty much wiped out all of them, including me. (The school was huge; 4,000+ students, 17 acre campus; hundreds of staff.) My class size the last semester was 44 students. There weren't enough desks in my classroom, and my requests for more desks went on deaf ears. With the help of another teacher -- a long time veteran, and a good friend -- I literally stole furniture from other classrooms to rectify the situation.

Needless to say, teaching at that school utterly sucked.

They replaced the six math teachers (including me) with Phillipine immigrant teachers. That didn't work out too well either.

I taught one more semester at that school at night school (without a contract, on a substitute's pay). The night school principal knew my teaching style and asked me to help him out. My success there was very good. State law prevented the district from retaining me for another semester. I would have done it, even at substitute pay.

That ended my public school teaching career; the same as many others under similar conditions. Although I was allowed to resign, it was a blot to which the new regimes pay attention. To be fired (non-reselected) as a teacher would permanently ruin ones career. I later taught advanced math students for their SAT exams, but that ended my working days.

I retired and took early retirement.