I nearly jumped outta my skin when a friend told me how lucky I was to have teaching as my “fall back career.” I wished I could’ve traveled through the cell phone to cuss her out in person. She’d caught me off guard, sliding that insult disguised as a compliment into our otherwise friendly, yearly Thanksgiving Day phone call.
I realize George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Those who can’t do, teach,” but I’m beginning to think he was merely jealous of the lifelong passion one derives from doing what one truly loves. Yes, there are people who trudge through jobs they hate, day in and day out just to make ends meet. They are sellouts. Some of them are teachers, but really they could be soullessly doing anything for money. Even writing plays.
Yet, once I resigned from teaching at an Austin public school, I’d finally combined both my passions for teaching and writing as a freelance editor and writer of online educational materials. I wrote Biology lessons, imagining how engaged students would be with the interactive exercises I created. I actually missed being with students, but not asshole administrators.
As fate would have it, I ended my last freelance educational writing contract the first week of December 2014 and didn’t get another until the last week of December 2015. In between time, I taught an evening adult basic education class, which allowed me to do yoga, paint and write in the mornings and interact with students in the evenings.
I loved it. One of the best lessons I learned, I’d actually heard myself telling a student, who thought it was incredulous that I enjoyed teaching math. I told her, “Because I know how to teach math, I will always have a job.”
I must explain that’s not the only reason I enjoy teaching math, but as any adult education instructor will tell you, adult students are mostly motivated to return to school because they are tired of dead-end, minimum-wage jobs with questionable job security and most likely, an openly inhumane supervisor. So, highlighting a clear economic link between understanding math, a subject majority of my students struggle with, and job security, is a good thing.
Later, it hit me: as long as I can teach math, I will always have a job. Eureka! Never had I picked out a specific skill, besides being fabulous at strategic thinking and organization, both of which I attribute to mathematical reasoning, from the myriad of teaching skills, and saw the marketable commodity I’ve honed for 20 years and counting.
Once I became a licensed teacher with a Masters in Education, I thought my career path was set. Long ago, people remained with the same company and/or career throughout their entire professional life. That world began to disappear about 40 years ago and the rise of the Internet and its technological cousins accelerated this transformation.
My career journey traveled a little off the beaten path since I began both teaching and writing as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I’ve leapt from one international, exotic location to the next, teaching math and science. Never once had I felt I’d fallen backwards. As a matter of fact, I credit my international teaching career for helping out my fall back writing career!
Just to show that the universe continues to conspire with me, I recently had the inspiration to start training parkour, thanks to watching one of my nephews train. That’s a perfect analogy for how I now visualize my career trajectory: leaping, swinging, climbing and flipping from one challenge to the next, using whichever skills I need at the time to meet my personal and professional goals.