This post is not really about the history of science and medicine but it might be of interest to some people who, upon learning how difficult the academic job market is, decide they want to pursue another, though closely related, career option.
Here’s my story:
After obtaining my M.A. in 2008, I decided to take some time off from graduate school. Ostensibly it would just be for a year, but I had some misgivings about pursuing the PhD and wanted to explore other, related options in an effort to think broadly about my future. My most serious considerations included: a transition into business—management consulting, actually, as peculiar as that seems to me now; joining the Foreign Service; or teaching high school, either in the U.S. or at an international school in Europe. I pursued each of these options fairly extensively, and perhaps I will write about the first two another time. For now, I’d like to talk about the pursuit of a high school teaching job.
Teaching high school has always appealed to me—it still does. I had a truly incredible academic experience in high school, and it left a deep impression on me. After having taught hungover, often uninterested college students (obviously there were pleasant exceptions) as a T.A. in grad school, I began to see how refreshing it might be to work with younger students who, in an ideal world, were eager to learn about the world—and life. Yes, this is the ideal case, very rarely witnessed, but I knew it was possible, given my own experience. And I also felt that one’s impact as a teacher in high school would, on the whole, be far greater than one’s impact as a teacher at the university level. I still believe this. For whatever biological and social reasons, high school students are much more impressionable than college students; that age is a critical developmental stage in our lives. We remember our high school teachers, even the bad ones, in ways that rarely apply to our college professors (obviously, again, there are exceptions to this; I imagine this is particularly unfair to students who attend small liberal arts colleges, but I digress).
In addition to the quasi-transcendental rewards of teaching high school, there were elements about the lifestyle that appealed to me as well. One got ample vacation time, just like a professor, even if a lot of this would be dedicated to grading or course development. There were the long summers. And one would normally work in an academic environment with colleagues who also cared about intellectual pursuits, or at least a dedication to their craft. This is, to be sure, a very rosy picture of the profession, but no less so than I had had of the ‘life of the mind’ as a university professor. And, while comparing future professions, I gave myself some luxury to trade in ideals; after all, I wanted—and still want—to be passionate about what I spend my time doing, and dedication to an ideal is a significant part of this (for me, anyways).
Sure, the pay and prestige of teaching high school would be lower—sometimes significantly—than teaching at a university. And this is not to be minimized. But I felt that, for the most part, there were more similarities between teaching high school and teaching at a university than differences. I could get a lot of the benefits of the academic lifestyle and still find a job. Indeed, having an M.A. (to say nothing of a PhD) would automatically make me a fairly desirable commodity! It was a tremendously refreshing feeling, after the usual disappointments and stresses of graduate school life, to finally be sought after by prospective employers. And, indeed, some of my elder graduate school colleagues, after becoming frustrated with the academic job market, decided to teach high school and seemed quite happy doing so. So I was quite taken with the prospect.
Before becoming serious about options, however, I had to make some logistical decisions. Where did I want to teach? At what kind of school—public or private? Boarding or day? International or parochial? Perhaps understandably, I gravitated toward what my own experience had been like, in my case at a very elite boarding school in the Northeast of the U.S. I was interested in this for a variety of reasons: I knew what I would be getting into and I knew the lifestyle. Yes, teaching at a boarding school can be very demanding, especially as one has even less ‘free’ time than one would have at a day school. It’s a total, immersive experience. But I kind of wanted that. Plus, there were some non-remunerative benefits, often including free housing and meals. In fact, the more I looked at, the more it seemed that, at least as a high school teacher at a boarding school, I could probably make as much as an assistant professor at a research university, if one included the non-salary benefits. This was a somewhat startling realization. Why go through the hell of the academic job market when one could teach high school for somewhat similar pay (at least at first, and obviously there were serious caps on what one could earn as one’s seniority rose)?
Part of me, though, had serious misgivings about teaching at an elite private school, boarding or otherwise. I was keenly aware of my own privileged education and knew plenty of fellow students who did not appreciate, nor seemed to deserve, the incredible education they were getting at a very steep price. Did I want to perpetuate the increasing educational inequality between the haves and have-nots in American society? My liberal instincts were pushing me in the other direction, to teach at a public high school with students from diverse economic and cultural backgrounds, where the benefits to society would be much greater. After all, the privileged students at a boarding school would, I presumed, do just fine, whether they had inspiring teachers or not. This could not be assumed for the many students who struggle through the American public school system. The moral and social impact I might have at a public high school would be more significant—for me and for my students—than if I worked at an elite private school.
But there were unforeseen challenges to teaching at a public high school. Although the salary would normally be higher at a public high school, the non-remunerative benefits that came with teaching and living at a boarding school would be missing. Perhaps a public boarding school would have been the ideal fit, but there were few, if any, of those in the U.S. (this is slowly changing, due to the very welcome efforts of non-profits like the SEED foundation). Perhaps more significantly for me at the time, not just anyone could begin teaching as a public school teacher. One needed to be certified to teach in the state in which the school resided. And this usually required taking courses at a school of education for a year or two and then passing some tests. I didn’t have the time or inclination to do that. In fact, I could have had a PhD in history and years of teaching experience as a professor but still be unqualified—so far as the law was concerned—to teach public high school. Yet I could teach at a private school as soon as I found a job. Regardless of the merits (or inanities) of state and federal teaching regulations, the consequence for me was that teaching at a public school was out of the question—at least for now. And it was this, perhaps more than anything else, that ensured that I would not be teaching at a public high school, even if I felt a certain amount of moral obligation to do so.
So I would look for jobs at private high schools (day or boarding) for the time being. But where? I had long wanted to move to Europe and suddenly a new option occurred to me. What about teaching at an international school in, say, the Netherlands or Italy? The education would be in English, even though many of the students might not speak English as their native tongue, so I would be able to teach there. And teaching history to students from a variety of different countries and cultures, while challenging, would also be particularly interesting. How do you, for instance, teach the Cuban Missile Crisis to a group of Russian, German, American and Italian students? Clearly, there can be no appeal to nationalistic history, let alone the assumption that basic cultural facts about the protagonists will be known or understood. So the addition of a mix of cultures and languages in a school environment—something I didn’t have much experience of during my own time in high school—might really add significantly to the teaching experience—in a good way.
So with these considerations in mind, I revised my resume/CV, obtained my references, put together an appealing teaching portfolio (and accompanying webpage to show I was hip with technology) and began the job hunt. I took the job search seriously and put in the effort to show that I did so.
One of the first things I learned was that, while one could potentially cold call a school to find out about job opportunities, many of them preferred applicants to go through one of the big recruiting firms that specialized in educational placement. I signed up to work with Carney, Sandoe & Associates for my U.S. private school search, and with Search Associates and International School Services (ISS) for my international school search. And my search for a high school teaching job had begun!
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Perhaps at some later date, I will continue to the conclusion of this story. Suffice it to say that I am now back in a PhD program, very excited about my research and very happy with my decision to return to grad school, albeit in the U.K. instead of the U.S. But I did have two very appealing job offers to teach high school history—one at an elite West Coast boarding school and one at an international school in Switzerland. Although I decided to turn these down for personal reasons, I enjoyed the process and am happy to give advice to those interested in pursuing this appealing career option. Who knows—perhaps, if I get churned out by the academic job search like others before me, I will return to my earlier idea of teaching high school, with PhD in hand. There are many benefits to doing so! Although it turned out not to be the right decision for me at that time, I have learned not to make any claims on the future.