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| Thursday, October 16, 2008 |
| Some professionals bail out of finance and into teaching |
USAToday reports: Some professionals bail out of finance and into teaching It's too early to say for sure, but a few observers believe public schools could be the beneficiaries of a brainpower shift from the trading floors of Wall Street and the hedge funds of Greenwich, Conn., to classrooms nationwide.
This fall, for instance, New York City's Teaching Fellows program, which trains career-changers to work in city schools, saw the percentage of applicants listing "finance" as their current job rise to 10%, up from 6% in 2006.
"As I've been trying to think of silver linings, that's the only one I've come up with," says Allan Taylor, a Greenwich attorney who chairs the Connecticut State Board of Education.
"We've taken some of the strongest mathematical minds and sent them to figure out computerized stock trading programs. I'm not an economist, but in my mind, the country would have been better off if some of them had gone into K-12 or college teaching." Hum, I wonder if these former finance workers turned elementary math teachers might also slip some personal finance advice into their lesson plans... |
| posted by Boston Gal @ 7:33 AM *
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| 5 Comments: |
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There are few things that make me happier than positive unintended consequences.
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Unless of course you live in Dallas, where someone miscalculated salaries and they ended up with a $64 million budget deficit and are letting go 450 teachers and more 50 other positions last I heard. At one point they were talking numbers as high as about 1000 positions. I haven't heard an explanation of how they "miscalculated" the salaries.
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you know the saying: those who can do, those who can't teach. do we really want people from wall street responsible for this mess to be teaching?
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I'm a teacher and several of my colleagues are career changers, moving from the corporate world into teaching. While it's tough to generalize, I'd say that, on the whole, these people make lousy teachers. Mostly, they come in with an arrogant attitude, that teaching is going to be a cake walk compared to their work at whatever Fortune 500 they used to work for. I'm certainly not one of those teachers who whines about how arduous the work is (we get summers off!), it's just a very different kind of difficult, working with kids. I hope that these finance "whizzes" are going through comprehensive training programs, and enter their first job with realistic expectations about what the work will be like.
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While I think it is wonderful that we get some more well educated people into teaching, I agree with the last commenter, these people are just not prepared for all that teaching requires. At my former inner city school we would get about 30 new teachers each year and about half would be coming from other fields, most would be gone by the end of the first month. I also believe that this will be temporary unless issues such as teaching conditions, support, and compensation can be fixed. These people will be returning to their previous line of work as soon as economic conditions improve.
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There are few things that make me happier than positive unintended consequences.