I Am a Career Switcher

"I can't afford to pay you."  Those words were delivered to me by my boss more a than a year ago, when he announced he would be cutting me to part-time.  They were the same words another superior said to me two years earlier, the first time my job was cut back.

Following the Great Recession and the slow economic recovery, I had been vacillating (that's how the boss put it) between full-time and part-time, with varying levels of responsibility.  And it hit me one day:  I was a 45 year old man driving a 16 year old car to a part-time job at 4:00 in the morning.  Something had to change.  And that made me stop vacillating and reconsider my entire radio career. 

But what could I do?  What career could I pursue with the skills I have?  Those skills:  good story teller; excellent at compressing news stories into three-line nuggets; expert keyboardist; experienced at Internet editing; self-motivated.  Copy writing?  Public relations?  Maybe.  However, I had nothing but a college degree in physical education to show I was certified in any of the fields I was applying for.  So after much consideration, my wife and I decided it was time for me to get certified in something:  education.

I entered the spring session of Old Dominion University's Career Switcher Program.  Ten weeks to earn a teaching license.  Classes were all day Saturday for ten weeks, plus the really tough part:  night classes.  Tuesdays and Thursdays, I attended class from 6pm to 9:30pm.  With the 35 mile drive from Suffolk's Tri-Cities Center, I usually wasn't home until after 10pm, with a wake up time of 3:40am the next morning for my part-time job.  If any of my radio colleagues noticed I was listless last spring, they now know the reason why.

It was a crash course in education.  Classes focused on designing an effective learning plan, reading for any  curriculum, at-risk students, dealing with parents, SOL's, and classroom management.  I was also required to observe working teachers in the classroom for a certain number of hours, and I had to make my own lesson plan and present it to my classmates.

Five months after completing Career Switchers, I have just been hired as a 7th grade teacher in science and social studies at Virginia Beach Middle School. I learned a lot in Career Switchers, but one thing I wasn't prepared for was the need for making split-second decisions a hundred times an hour.  "Can I go to the bathroom, Mr. Long?"  "What are we doing?"  "He took my pencil!"  It's busier than even my wife, a 23 year veteran teacher, has ever described it. 

It's busy, alright, but I'm not looking back at 20 years in radio broadcasting.  I'm looking ahead at a new career as an educator.  I am a career switcher.