I made the transition from a career in industry to education in the past couple of years. It's been an interesting path.
I'm definitely a subject matter expert. And I'm able to get pretty deep content into middle school and high school classrooms. And working with smaller subgroups of students is a lot like mentoring junior engineers.
But man, dealing with a lot of kids in the room is a challenge-- keeping the lower third of students motivated; modulating strictness up and down so that you can have exuberance but not disruption; picking up on the subtle signs that there is a problem from outside spilling over into the classroom while multitasking and doing 3 other things. And... just coping when there's an entire class period that felt like a waste and you don't know why.
It is -hard-, and I'm dealing with an unusually easy teaching environment (classes of ~18-20 of well-behaved and academically advanced private school kids). I'm also not a core teacher and so I have the benefit of leaning on other professionals to do the heavy lifting in these areas. I still have hope I'll get good at it (this past year was a difficult one for me to self-assess my performance).
I do think that being an expert/having passion for what you teach is a bonus: if you have students that are already inclined to be engaged, that spark will help a little in getting and keeping their attention. But it is not the most important thing day to day.
Actually, my best performance lately was when I was a long-term sub in science classes teaching subject matter that is not my core competence. I could geek out and learn deeper stuff than I knew about volcanoes and share my surprise with the students, and that felt really good for engagement.
Awesome, good on you for getting into teaching! And thanks for weighing in. I’m surprised that the expertise and passion was only slightly helpful for getting engagement, we found it very contagious in our classes with the teacher I described, especially in the more advanced classes.
I'm definitely a subject matter expert. And I'm able to get pretty deep content into middle school and high school classrooms. And working with smaller subgroups of students is a lot like mentoring junior engineers.
But man, dealing with a lot of kids in the room is a challenge-- keeping the lower third of students motivated; modulating strictness up and down so that you can have exuberance but not disruption; picking up on the subtle signs that there is a problem from outside spilling over into the classroom while multitasking and doing 3 other things. And... just coping when there's an entire class period that felt like a waste and you don't know why.
It is -hard-, and I'm dealing with an unusually easy teaching environment (classes of ~18-20 of well-behaved and academically advanced private school kids). I'm also not a core teacher and so I have the benefit of leaning on other professionals to do the heavy lifting in these areas. I still have hope I'll get good at it (this past year was a difficult one for me to self-assess my performance).
I do think that being an expert/having passion for what you teach is a bonus: if you have students that are already inclined to be engaged, that spark will help a little in getting and keeping their attention. But it is not the most important thing day to day.
Actually, my best performance lately was when I was a long-term sub in science classes teaching subject matter that is not my core competence. I could geek out and learn deeper stuff than I knew about volcanoes and share my surprise with the students, and that felt really good for engagement.