The maiden voyage of this newsletter will be the story of how I became a teacher in the first place. Consider it the first part of a multi-part series of writings in which I detail the idiosyncrasies of the teaching profession, the chaos of the school district I teach in, the difficulties that new teachers face, and, occasionally, the rare moments that can trick you into thinking it’s all worth it. I can’t promise a phenomenal story, but readers can rest assured knowing that they will learn something of value from this series.
I graduated college from the University of Massachusetts in May of 2021. (I’ve learned to call it the University of Massachusetts without appending the “Amherst” on the end, but, in case you are unaware, that is where the flagship campus is located.) Due to much indecision on my part, I never fully decided what I wanted to do after college. I moved back home, and knowing only that I wanted to be a writer some day, I started writing freelance articles for a local news outlet. Since I was not a full employee and I was untested, my editor stuck me on the least coveted assignments: mostly covering town selectman’s meetings in two relative backwaters of the county I’m from. (Nothing against these towns, but they’re not supremely interesting to cover as a newly graduated reporter.) After a few months of this, it became clear that the publisher of the company did not want to hire me full-time, so I began looking for a way out.
Lo and behold, I received a text from a friend on Thursday, August 19, 2021, at 11:07 P.M. It read simply, “You wanna teach ELA [English Language Arts] at [Middle School which shall remain nameless]?”
I replied the following day, intrigued and confused. I asked for more details, which my friend duly supplied me with. He said that the school was desperate to fill some open positions, including some English and Math slots, and that he was also considering hopping aboard. His uncle works in the school system, which was why he knew so much about the conditions at the school in question, and apparently the situation had gotten so desperate that the district and school were farming out recruitment responsibilities to the nephews of employees who worked for the administration. My friend gave me the email address of the Vice Principal so I could ask for more information.
Let me pause here to note something that still surprises me. I mentioned that I first received this text from my friend on August 19. School started on September 1. I am no mathematical genius, but if my calculations are correct, the turnaround time between receiving that text and the first day of school was…thirteen days. Really twelve days, since that text came in close to midnight. This means that I had less than two weeks to turn 180 degrees and start a job that many people quit after their first year is up due to the demands it puts on their souls (and that’s not really an exaggeration). I should also note that my two college degrees are in Political Science and Economics, and that I had no experience in education prior to September 1 of last year.
My original email to the Vice Principal does not survive, but I think it went something like this:
Dear [Vice Principal’s name],
My name is Greg Fournier and I am a recent graduate from UMass Amherst. I am reaching out because a friend of mine emailed me to see if I wanted to teach at the middle school this year. I do not have any experience teaching and my college degrees were not in education, but I think I am a strong writer and could teach English well. Please let me know if you are still interested in having people teach.
He emailed me back shortly thereafter and asked to set up a phone call for the following day.
The next day was Monday, August 23. I called the VP around 9 A.M. and he asked me some basic questions, but he really wanted to know if I was available for an interview later that day. I said I was, so around noon I pulled into the school and first met my future Vice Principal.
The Vice Principal is the longest-serving member of the school’s teaching faculty. He taught Social Studies for a while before becoming Vice Principal, a position he has held for over ten years. He has taught three generations of some families that have walked through the doors of the school. Every student knows him and most love him; though he can be intimidating, he often acts as a comforting presence for children who have little stability at home. He is about five-foot-ten but walks with a stoop that shrinks him an inch or so. He wears his gray hair short and is almost never seen without a tie on, lending gravitas to his already stately figure. He is one of those people who you would never forget if you met him—and, bizarrely, he will never forget your birthday. A favorite parlor trick of his is to walk around a room and correctly recall everyone’s birthday. It’s unnerving at times, but one can imagine that students of his must have been awed each time he performed this trick during class.
My first meeting with him was much more mundane, yet also more consequential. He escorted me into a classroom and we exchanged some pleasantries. I told him that I went to school at the other middle school in town, and we chatted about some teachers who had been there while I attended school. When we got down to business, he explained that this meeting was more of a formality than anything. He knew that I had no previous teaching experience or licenses, but the circumstances allowed him to set aside normal protocol. He had a list of questions that only people who have taught for at least a year would be able to answer, like the difference between formative and summative assessments, how I would use data to enhance my teaching, etc. Of course, I knew none of the answers to these more technical questions, but the VP assured me that this was okay. Forty-five minutes or so after I entered the school, he declared my performance during the “interview” satisfactory, and that the only other hurdle would be to consult with the Principal.
The Principal when I was hired was a short, restless man, balding but with a thick beard. From my experience with him, he is more of an intellectual than a teacher or administrator. I have heard nothing but good things about his teaching style, but every time I heard him speak, I could tell that he had done his homework. His office was filled with books about teaching and for good reason: He was completing his PhD in Education during the school year. This is a cause for concern that I will come back to in future newsletters, but this shows the type of impression he made on me.
The VP and I walked into the Principal’s office to receive the final judgment. The VP declared me fit to teach. The Principal looked at me and asked me just one question: “Do you think every kid can learn?”
There is only one correct reply to this when you are interviewing to be hired as a teacher, so I gave it: “Yes.”
“Then you’re hired.”
It really was that simple. With no prior experience, no educator’s license, and no teaching degree, I was hired as a 7th grade English teacher. I had never before met the VP, the Principal, or any other teacher at the school. No one could vouch for me, other than a friend whose uncle worked in the school system, the VP based on the hour we spoke, and the Principal based on the one question he asked me. This is interesting, because from the perspective of the school, I was a complete nobody. Sure, the VP could call around and ask previous teachers of mine if they thought I could handle teaching. But otherwise, they knew nothing about me. I could have been completely incompetent as a teacher or lacked all knowledge about various English concepts. I could have been a dishonest or unreliable employee. Heck, I could have even been a Republican. Yet such was the desperation of their situation that they hired me one day after I sent my first email to either of them.
Of course, I am happy that they did hire me. I had always toyed with the idea of becoming a teacher, but never really committed to taking any of the steps to making that distant possibility a reality. Plus, my former job was boring and unsteady, and I did not see myself advancing very far down that avenue of opportunity. To be gainfully employed at twenty-two years old, less than six months after graduating college, is nowhere close to guaranteed. Moreover, as I described to several people at the time, this was no ordinary job. While it is possible to quit teaching mid-year, it is rare, and, in my opinion, shameful. Therefore, I knew going into it that I was making a commitment at least one school year long. I have never been one to take such leaps of faith, but I figured that the time was upon me to do just that.
It is, however, somewhat unnerving that it was so easy for me to become a teacher. This is what I want to spend the rest of this newsletter delving into.
Because of Covid-19, much of our society has had to reorganize itself. The shutdowns in the first two weeks of the disease were extended nearly ad infinitum, which forced a reworking of many aspects of our civilization that we had previously considered inviolate. One shift took place in the field of education. I experienced firsthand the student side of that change because my final two and a quarter years of college took place entirely on Zoom. I have now experienced the teacher end of the spectrum, though thankfully I did not begin teaching until everyone was back in the actual school buildings. Just as we saw with supply chain issues coming out of Covid and are now experiencing with inflation, some of these changes seeped deep into the inner workings of society.
One such change that Massachusetts, among other states, made during the pandemic was to grant emergency education licenses. This allows people like me—with no teaching experience or credentials but a curiosity for teaching and, perhaps, a hankering for a steady paycheck—to easily become a teacher without jumping through many hoops. In normal times, Massachusetts teachers must apply for an Initial license, which allows them to teach while they pursue their Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure (MTELs). They then have to take a series of MTELS that vary depending on the subject they teach. I, for instance, have initiated the process and have thus far had to take two sub-tests that assess my proficiency in the English language generally; if I continue down this path, I will have to take another test to see what I know of the finer details of English Language Arts and History, since I applied for a license that allows me to teach both ELA and Social Studies. I would then have to take a course on Sheltered English Immersion (SEI), which instructs me on how to teach to children who speak English as their second language. Finally, I would have to submit record of at least 150 hours of teaching as an internship or as a full-time job. Only after submitting all of this would I be able to hold an Initial license.
This is a daunting list of tasks that confront a new teacher and has certainly dissuaded people from becoming teachers in the past. Combine this general reluctance to become a fully licensed teacher with the emotional toll of teaching remotely during a pandemic and the terrible behavior that pandemic-raised children exhibited upon returning to school and you get a true shock to the system. The above factors contributed to a staffing shortage in countless schools across the country in the 2021-22 school year that mirrored the lack of available employees in the rest of the economy.
These staffing shortages were glaringly present at my school. When I walked into the building for my first New Teacher’s Orientation (NTO—sorry for all the acronyms and initialisms, but education is lousy with them), there were over fifteen new teachers in attendance. Even with all of those new hires, the school was short at least two spots throughout most of the year (Music and 7th Grade Science). This was compounded by the shortage of substitute teachers, which forced us to cover our colleagues when enough of them were out to warrant such an “emergency coverage schedule.” But that’s a topic for another newsletter.
All of this is to say that Emergency Licenses were miserably needed at our school this year. Without them, I would not have been able to get a job so quickly and easily, and other first-year teachers would be similarly out of luck. And yet, it brings up a thorny question: Do Emergency Licenses reduce the quality of teachers who hold them?
Let’s briefly set aside education to explore a hypothetical in a different field. As I mentioned, pandemic-induced labor shortages were all the rage in the summer of 2021, so one can imagine that a similar need to boost employment existed in other fields. Let’s imagine that the medical field experienced such a profound shortage that the American Medical Association lowered the standards needed to obtain a medical degree and practice on patients. Furthermore, let’s imagine that you need an emergency lung transplant, and just before you go under the knife, you realize that your doctor is fresh out of his residency. Wouldn’t you feel uneasy going into such an operation knowing that your surgeon may have become a doctor without going through the full licensure procedure? Wouldn’t you try to ascertain whether your doctor skipped some of the steps to becoming a full-fledged doctor, and perhaps petition for a more experienced one who you know went through all the traditional trials and tribulations?
Perhaps this is not the best analogy. After all, doctors performing lung transplants could kill you, whereas the likelihood of an unlicensed teacher committing manslaughter is far lower. But the scenario is useful to demonstrate why parents, teachers, and children may be uneasy at the thought of a host of new and untested teachers trying to elucidate the difference between an independent and a dependent clause or adding fractions.
While I sympathize with the concerns of these stakeholders in education, my libertarian instincts and personal experience rebel at the notion that “unlicensed” means “unable.” I worked with many teachers last year who are more credentialed than I am and yet, from what I heard from administrators and students, they were not as good at teaching as I was. Moreover, middle school subjects just are not that difficult for a recent college graduate. As I said above, I am no math whiz, but I was able to help many of my students with their math homework, despite my being an English teacher. Finally, I find it immoral, insulting, and impractical for state departments of education to dictate a high level of credentials for a new teacher. (I have not even mentioned that Massachusetts teachers must obtain their Master’s degree in Education after teaching for five years.) It is immoral because it suggests that those who are turned away from teaching by the onerous licensure requirements are somehow inferior to those who complete the government-mandated courses. It is insulting because it implies a holier-than-thou attitude of those who issued the requirements in the first place. And it is impractical because schools are always looking to fill open positions, yet the checklist deters those who would otherwise take the leap.
So, yes: The educational licensure regime is a complex tangle of tests, supplemental courses, and headaches that does a better job of dampening prospective teacher enthusiasm than it does of actually ensuring a high quality of education. As I will discuss in further newsletters, teachers may be part of the reason why education in America is so poor. Therefore, it is not obvious that education is improved by enforcing a high bar.
The Emergency Licensure program is a welcome change to the teaching crisis in America. It helped yours truly to become a teacher in relatively short order, which allowed my school to function at a slightly higher capacity. Plus, it helps to chip away at the notion that all teachers must be highly qualified (on paper, at least) to teach well. I hope that education policymakers notice this and take steps to further reduce the requirements to become a fully licensed teacher.
I hope you liked my first newsletter! Please feel free to comment on this if you liked it, or if you have any responses to any of the claims I make here. Also, if you want to forward this email to people who may find it interesting, please do so. I’ve heard that word of mouth is the best form of advertising on this type of thing. See you next week!
A disclaimer: Due to a deeper consideration of some of the career risks I run in writing this newsletter, I have edited this and other newsletters to remove some identifying information that I included when I wrote it at first. I don’t think it will take away from the value of the newsletter, but you may notice some awkward repetitions of words or phrases (like “the Vice Principal”) to avoid identifying anybody by name. Thank you for your understanding.
Great opening salvo G! Maybe next time you can take me into the mysterious "teachers lounge." I spent many a day in the 1970's careening my neck in the hallway to try and see around the series of doors keeping me from what seemed like a never ending day time party. I recall smoke and music billowing out each time the door opened but perhaps that is just my imagination.