Teaching Mathematics
2008-Present
While I was working from home on my business, I was also serving as the at-home parent for my two kids. My daughter was in early elementary school at the beginning of my at-home business phase and by the end, my son was also in elementary school, so I spent some time volunteering in their classrooms as a parent.
I found that I really liked working with school children - it was great to interact with the kids and to help them learn! That is the first time I really considered teaching as a career.
I had some friends who were teachers, so I asked them about it, and they all told me the same thing: "Teaching can be a very rewarding experience, but it isn't for everybody. You should expect hard work and lower pay than what you made as an engineer. But if you want to find out if teaching is for you, go get a substitute teaching certificate and try teaching a compulsory subject in a middle-school."
So that is what I did. I got a sub certificate and signed up to teach math or science classes in the Kyrene School District at middle schools. I did this for about six months, primarily working at Pueblo Middle School but also a couple of times at Centennial Middle School and once at Kyrene Middle School.
From my experiences substitute teaching I found that I did indeed enjoy teaching, however I liked teaching the most when I had long-term sub assignments where I could start to get to know the students a little, and where I could do actual teaching, rather than just having them do 'word-searches' or something similar.
I thought it would be particular interesting if I could teach advanced math with my engineering background, and looked into possibly teaching as a college professor, but to do this at a university, you have to have a Ph.D. in Mathematics (or at least be working towards one). My degree was a Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering (which is more applied math than pure math), so that was not a good fit.
Becoming a professor at a Community College was also an option, however, most of the instructors there are Adjunct Professors who do not make very much money...there are only a few full-time staff that are paid significantly more, but those positions are rare (at that time, the average time to land such a position was 8 years).
I knew the salary for teachers would be significantly lower than what I made as an engineer, but if you worked in the public school system, you were eligible for a pension in retirement - which was becoming a rare thing in industry, even in engineering. That also meant that teaching at a private school did not seem like a good option because private schools generally do not use certified teachers, so their teachers are not part of the pension system. That meant the answer was to teach in a public school, and based upon my experiences subbing in middle-school and the desire to eventually teach higher math, a public high school would be the best choice.
So I went back to ASU and got a Masters in Secondary Education, specializing in teaching Mathematics. This program included student teaching (which I did at Corona del Sol High School), and then I got a full-time teaching job at Desert Vista High School to start the 2010-2011 school year.
Once I got hired, though, I was discouraged to find out that I could only teach Algebra 1, Geometry, Honors Geometry, Algebra 2, and Honors Algebra 2. All of the courses higher than this were offered for Dual Enrollment credit from Rio Salado Community College, which meant that to teach these courses you needed to be on Rio Salado staff as a Dual-Enrollment Instructor (which was similar to an Adjunct Math Professor) and that required that you have a certain number of graduate-level math content courses. So on top of my Masters in Secondary Education, I had to take a bunch of additional classes, mainly online from a variety of universities, which I did during the summers. It took me 4 years to complete this process and to get certified with Rio Salado, but that opened the door for me to teach the more advanced math courses.
I have taught a variety of levels of math over the 15 years I've taught at Desert Vista, as well as the time student teaching and substitute teaching before that. Here are all of the math courses I have taught over the years:
- 6th grade math
- 7th grade math
- Prealgebra
- Algebra 1
- Geometry/Co-taught Geometry
- Precalculus
- Honors Precalculus
- Honors Algebra 2
- Honors Finite Math / Brief Calculus
- AP Statistics
- AP Calculus BC
- Honors Calculus III/Differential Equations
Some final thoughts about my career experiences...
I found engineering to be a very interesting and lucrative career. The places I worked all had good salary and benefits, and nearly all of the jobs I chose involved learning about interesting new technologies. As an engineer, your main job is to solve problems (of all kinds).
I personally experienced a lot of turmoil in my engineering career, having 7 different jobs at 5 different companies. A lot of that turmoil was just bad luck, and luck turned out to be a much bigger part of career success than I initially imagined. I do know many engineers who have had more stable careers, though, and note a couple of difference to keep in mind if you are choosing engineering as a career.
At most companies, after you've been an engineer at the 'individual contributor' level there begins to develop pressure to move up the career ladder to become a manager or to work in other more business-oriented fields. I became an engineer because I liked math and engineering and wanted to solve technical problems, and I didn't really want to manage people or become involved in the internal company politics that are a part of nearly all management positions.
So I actively turned down opportunities to move up into management multiple times, instead staying at the engineer level, and that meant that if projects ended, I was more frequently laid off than those who chose the management path. Of the 7 jobs I had as an engineer, I only left 2 of those voluntarily - the others were all ended when the project was canceled, or the department or entire company shut down, so mainly just bad luck, although I think I tended towards taking jobs on the more 'design' side of engineering which meant I was often involved in more uncertain, riskier ventures. My friends who have stayed in engineering for their entire careers have almost all eventually moved into the management positions.
My experiences in teaching have been quite different. I find that I work as many or more hours as a teacher as I did as an engineer, and for significantly less money. But teaching involves essentially no travel and even when I do need to work at home, I have more control over when I can put those work hours in than I did as an engineer, so I can be more present with my family than I was as an engineer.
But the main benefit of teaching is being able to work with students, and the feeling that I am making more of a positive difference in the world being able to help students to reach their own goals in life!
Finally, if you've read through this hoping for insights into your own future career in engineering or teaching, keep in mind that, as time passes, things about the work world and careers in general continue to change. With the prospect of AI, the gig work economy, and the degree to which the United States participates in a larger global economy and workforce, career experiences in the future are likely to be much different than what I experienced between 1987 and the present :)