My father, who recently retired as a teacher with 40 years in the same school, spoke at his schools 2003 commencement. When the teachers strolled in, the majority looked like teenagers to me.
It really is a lot cheaper to hire a recent college grad with no experience and no advanced coursework completed. You could probably get two plus inexperienced teachers for the price of one highly experienced teacher with a Masters + 40 hours of grad work. Beyond that, a new teacher is probably more willing to sponsor afterschool activities, less likely to be burned out and more likely to have learned some modern pedagogical methods.
The old man could have retired ten years ago at 85% of the pension he receives today. Strong incentive for many to retire “early.”
Older teachers are often encouraged to retire early, either by incentives, or by making their jobs a living nightmare until they either quit or retire.
Something like half the teachers in Texas are no longer teaching in Texas within five years of certification – they’ve either left the state, or left the field to go into private work of some sort.
After transferring to UT (the one east of the Mississippi, for those of you in Texas), I discovered I had to take freshman English (the first university and the community college gave me advanced placement credit … UT wouldn’t :mad: ). My instructor was, of course, a grad student (an adorable blonde) who graduated high school the same year I did! :eek:
Lots of young teachers at my high school too; actually it seems like both extremes. We get teachers in their twenties or teachers in their forties and there’s no middle ground there.
Hmm, thinking about it, I just realized that most of our female teachers seem to be in their late thirties or over, while most of our male teachers seem to be younger than 30.
There is a tendency for teachers to take an extended “baby break” in the middle of their carreer. Certainly not all, or even most, teachers do this, but at my school many of the older teachers started teaching in their 20s, stayed at home with babies–or did something else that was less time consuming while hte babies were young–from the mid twenties to the miid-to-late thirties, and then came back into the field. This may have something to do with the tendency to remember teachers as very young or very old.
I also wonder how much this affects the “half of new teachers leave the profession in the first five years” thing. I know many of my fellow young teachers plan to start families in the next few years–as do many women in their mid-to-late twenties–and plan to leave the profession for a year or two and then come back. I have always wondered if this trend is accounted for in those statistics.
Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a teacher take a “baby break.” The teachers I’ve seen over the years have instead either had their children very, very early in their careers, or don’t have them at all. (I think several years of teaching tends to burn one out on being around children all the time.) All the ones I’ve known have always worked right through, though, except for one lady whose baby was in the NICU for months and then had multiple doctor’s appointments every week. She took a year off to take care of the kid’s medical problems, then came back when the little one was healthier.
Duuuude…I didn’t know you went to Lane Tech! My father and my little sister went there (I live about four blocks away from there now, so my son will probably go there too). You’re too young to have known my dad though.
I don’t know how representative this is, of course, but a whole load of my teachers retired last year, so we’ve got a bunch of news ones. And not one of them looks over twenty-five. I rather like this, in fact, as we’d become used to near-retirement-age teachers, and their youthful energy is refreshing(!)
I guess the only problem is the fact one of them, a Politics teacher, is in her first job, having just got her degree. She’s twenty-one. She’s teaching a class of girls who are seventeen and eighteen. You can see she struggles to keep everyone in line and paying attention.
So, um, in conclusion, I don’t really know the answer to the question, but I figure that if they know their stuff, who cares how old they are?
I’m a 22-year-old 8th grade math teacher in a very low-income urban school, and I know for a fact that I will never be an old teacher. Two years, three tops, and I’ll be too burned out to do it any more. I love it, but I’m pretty sure this is one of the hardest jobs in the universe.
I just started taking an Intro to Education course and one of the handouts we’ve been given lists the median age of teachers at 5 year intervals starting in 1961 and ending in 1996.
The data is based on surveys of public school teachers, and though I have no idea how accurate the data is, it would suggest that fewer young teachers have been entering the field and/or older teachers have been sticking around for longer.
It would make sense then that as the median rose, it would hit a point where many of the older teachers retired and more young teachers entered the field, thereby lowering the median age. I would guess that we’ve hit one of those roll-overs, and that is why many people are noticing a seeming influx of younger teachers.
I think it’s a good thing because more youthful teachers will be more in touch with the kids and what it’s like to grow up in today’s world, whereas older teachers are less apt to be able to relate; not to mention that younger teachers will be more open to utilizing different, newer teaching methods that many of the older teachers reject because they are set in their ways.
Throw in the probability that more of the younger teachers entering the field will be more computer literate than the veterans and I begin to have just a little bit of hope restored in the public school system.
As an aside, I in no way mean to belittle teachers that have been around the block a few times or to generalize that older=less in touch or capable; merely that, in my own personal experience, the public education system could use a good dose of youth instilled into it to shake things up, hopefully for the better.
It is… now, if only the PARENTS would realize that and try to help us, instead of making us the bad guy for their child’s poor behavior (which is most of the time a result of the parents).
