job description

I applied for a job opening at Waterloo East High School in 1986, and that's where I've worked for close to 21 years. I primarily teach special-education biology. It's the same curriculum but at a slower pace. At East, I began teaching Level 3 M.D., which stands for mental disability. These are kids in the same classroom all day because they can't handle going from class to class.

There are no promotions in teaching. I became the department head last year when the position opened up, but not everyone wants this job. It's a pain-in-the-neck job because there are so many extra things you have to do in addition to teaching.

I became the department chair when the position opened up a few years ago. There were two or three of us in the department who expressed interest in the job, but the principal of the school appointed me to be the chair, because he thought I was the best teacher for the position. There are 200 kids out of about 1,000 in our high school who are, in some way, involved with the special-education department. For students coming into high school from the 8th grade, I am responsible for talking with both teachers and students to make sure students are taking the right courses so they can succeed. Each semester, there are also standardized tests which are administered to all students, and special accommodations often need to be made. I oversee those accommodations.

Everyone in special education has an IEP, an individual education plan, which details his or her disabilities and goals. It takes me about two to three hours to put each one together for each student. The IEPs spell out the accommodations these students are allowed to have in their general education classes and with test-taking procedures. For example, we have kids who have severe forms of dyslexia and have to have their tests read to them or who are allowed to listen to books on tape. I have to make sure all their accommodations are being met, that everyone is aware when and where the tests are administered, and find teachers who can read tests out loud to students.

We work with the general education teachers, but we set different standards and benchmarks for our students. We also use alternative materials for our students. There's a lot of collaboration between teachers in my department and the teachers teaching the core high school courses like biology and math. I'm teaching two classes right now.

education & career path

When I was a freshman in college, I decided to major in the field. As a senior in high school, I graduated in 1976, I knew I wanted to teach art because I really liked my art classes and art teachers. I also loved working with kids. While in college, I began working for a company called Systems Unlimited (Iowa City, IA), a non-profit group that provides services for people with disabilities and other challenges. That's when I figured out that I wanted to work with kids with disabilities.

I just needed a part-time job as a college student, and they were hiring. It was during my sophomore year in college, and I wasn't all that fired up about it. But as I continued worked there, I grew to love it. I was teaching disabled kids daily skills and job skills, and I realized that I really liked working with them. I already knew I wanted to work with kids, and these kids were really loving. I worked at that job for a year or so. By my third year in college, I knew I no longer wanted to be an art teacher. I finished the art-education degree anyways. Then I went straight into getting my endorsement, which is a license to teach a special area in special education, for my master's degree.

I taught at Central High School in Waterloo, Iowa for two years, working with mentally disabled kids. It was my first job. In fact, I didn't even want the job they practically begged me to take it.

When I was finishing up my master's, I was carrying my first child. I didn't know if I was ready for a full-time job, so I applied for a teacher's aid position at the school. I had just found out about the pregnancy at the time, and I thought it might be better to start out as a teacher's aid. The day I went in for the interview, the director was in the office. He put his arm on my shoulders, and said, "Oh honey, you don't want to be a teacher's aid. Have I got a job for you," and offered me a teaching position right then and there. We always need special-education teachers. Just a few weeks ago, we had four openings for teachers at my school, and there were five applicants. It's the slim pickings.

In special-education training, more important than your grades is your personality, your aptitude for teaching, and your willingness to collaborate and take suggestions from others. You need to have good enough grades to stay in school, for sure. My grades weren't that great in my undergraduate education, but they were good enough to get me into graduate school. And then once you begin teaching, the more education you earn, the higher your salary. Most teachers I work with have obtained masters degrees, mostly in the process of teaching, so they can qualify for raises and keep up with changing curricula.

my day

I work 7 and a half hours per day. Some teachers come earlier and leave earlier, but almost everyone's out of there by 3:30 p.m. This past Friday, I taught some math and biology in the morning. Then I worked on filing a few IEPs, typical stuff, and then I worked on scheduling next year's classes for some incoming students. To do that, I had to contact different departments and high school counselors. There are 19 other special education teachers at our school. It is the biggest teaching department, by far. On Friday, when I was teaching, I also taught a lesson on conservation in my biology course. My students were really receptive to it. We talked about water cycles, water conservation, and where water goes after we flush it down the toilet. You know, out of 100 percent of earth's water, 97 percent is in the ocean, 2 percent is frozen and 1 percent is available to us. That's why it's important that as the population grows, water conservation and resources become important to learn about. You have to teach these kids, but you also have to explain to the kids, why are we learning this? Why do we need to know this? I teach, but I also help them answer these questions.

I have so many different duties each day, from handling situations with students, teachers, and even keeping track of the department's budget. A biology teacher in a general class may teach the same class every day, a few times per day. But for me the days never get boring. It's extremely challenging, in fact, because I'm working with almost 20 others teachers.

Most of my other colleagues who work in the special-education department earned their teaching endorsements in other areas like art and physical education. Some of them couldn't find jobs in these areas because there are so few teaching positions in these fields and such a low turnover rate for these positions, as well.

As a department head, I also often have to deal with the administration. Many of the teachers complain when they face changes in scheduling, conflicts with students, and more. But these problems are inevitable, and the teachers get used to it. Eventually, they have a change of heart. As department chair, it's difficult to balance the conflicting desire of 19 teachers, and I also have a desire to please. But my skin is getting much thicker. You have to be pretty easy going. Wherever you work, there's always going to be a group of people that's unhappy with the way things are or how they work. But I also collaborate with them, and when that happens, we exchange some really good ideas.

salary & lifestyle

It's great because I'm always home at 3:30 p.m. When my daughters went to school, I could leave work at 3:00 and be at home in time to greet them. I'm at home for a few weeks over Christmas, too. But more than anything, summers are the best part of my job. In my backyard I've got a garden. I love my garden, and I'm free to work on it all summer. Teaching is a great job because you're there for your kids while they're still young. Some days it was hard when I had to call in sick, and it was hard when my girls got sick. But the time off during the summer makes up for all of that. I'm paid to perform 190 days of work, but I'm paid all year because the school district splits up my pay over the course of 12 months. That option is available to teachers.

My salary this year is almost $59,000. That's with my master's degree in special-education, plus 30 hours college coursework that I've completed to keep my teaching accreditation current. Also, my salary reflects the work I do as a department chair. It does irk me, though, when some business and engineering majors starts out at that figure! I can go up one more step, to a master's plus 45 college credit hours, and my salary would increase slightly. Then, I could also take a break to get my doctorate, get paid even more. But I don't have any plans to do that.

Every few years, about five, your license for teaching comes up for renewal, and you have to take teaching and specialty courses and pay for them yourself. I received my master's degree from the University of Northern Iowa. Here in town, I've completed (in my spare time) 30 extra college credit hours. Every time you add hours, you get a pay raise (up to a certain point, of course).

In 1984 and 1986, when I began teaching my respective jobs, I started out at about $15,000 dollars. But now, as a special-education teacher, I'm almost at the cap for what we get paid. And of course, there's the extra compensation for being department head. I could never get hired in a town like Iowa City at my current salary, because they could hire two new teachers for my salary. Regardless, Iowa is rather low on the bar when it comes to teachers' salaries. It is in the bottom ten states.

No, not at all. For certain, it makes me a better mom. I've learned a lot of behavioral management skills from dealing with my students, a lot of skills which I've applied to raising my own kids. I'm caring in my personal life, and it's how I am with my students, as well. And, like any other job, you may have to finish at home what you can't finish at work. But this isn't a big problem in teaching. I take my stuff home sometimes, but not often, because most of what we do stays in the classroom. There are often papers to grade, and I often work on lesson plans at home, too. But the Internet has made life easier, because I get a lot of teaching materials from the Internet. We didn't have computers in wide use back in the 1980s when I began teaching, not even when I was getting my masters! I learned how to use computers during my teaching career. Sometimes, I even learn from my students how to do things.

In seven and half years I can retire. I'll be 56 then. A lot of teachers can retire young because, more often than not, they've stayed at the same jobs and schools for so long. I started teaching at the age of 27, a bit later than those who start right out of college at 23 or 24. Your pay depends primarily on your level of education and the years you've been teaching.

Sometimes, I think about being a professional trainer after I retire. I work out twice a week because my teaching job gives me time to maintain a great lifestyle. I don't want to be a frail old lady.

pros, cons & trends

When I first started teaching at East, I was teaching mentally disabled kids functional curricula, which is daily living and work skills like cooking, doing laundry, riding city buses (since most of them are not going to be driving around), shopping, cleaning and money management. Most of the older high schools kids were just starting their first jobs, and they could go out and use some of these skills.

I enjoyed it because these skills were relevant and useful to their lives. Once when I was teaching, a student of mine named Jerry was making a fruit cocktail and he pulled out a pan. I said "Jerry, there's something wrong here," and he just nodded in agreement. After that, he put the pan away and pulled out an even bigger one. I laughed and had to explain to him that you don't need to cook anything to make a fruit cocktail. Some kids would put popcorn in the microwave for five minutes. Things like this reminded me that these kids were, after all, mentally handicapped.

Humor. I always deal with my kids with humor. It's how I've always dealt with any situation. What I try to do is have a good relationship with my kids. I'm strict, that's for sure, but they know I like them. And it makes me feel really good, especially when I see them out in the community. It's rewarding for me to see them make progress, to move onto vocational rehabilitation, and live their lives.

With the IEPs (individualized education plans), there's a lot of paperwork that I'm responsible for. Regulations in identifying mental disabilities change every year, and you have to keep up with them. At the same time, their IEPs might change over the course of the semester, too, as the students meet their goals and fall back on them. For each of my 15 kids, I spend about three hours writing each IEP every few weeks.

Also, absences are the hardest thing to deal with from the kids. If they're absent, they don't do their homework. When the kids don't participate, they aren't getting the benefit of a good education. What's more, a lot of students have unrealistic expectations. They may be reading at a 3rd grade level, for example, and might want to be a doctor. That's when I have to show them, look, here is what you have to do to get here. It makes me feel really bad because some of the students want to do better than they're capable of. So I have to tell them, look, there's no special-education college. There's a lot of denial, by both students and parents. There are some things that are out of our hands.

As an educator, there are also the bigger picture things you have to deal with. Because of policies in special-education controlled by No Child Left Behind regulations, our policy-makers want 90% percent of kids in special-education to be taking at least 80% or their classes in regular classrooms by 2014. Experts say there will be almost 100% non-compliance on this. The demands are too high. You've got kids who aren't going to be able to achieve these results. And we have to deal with these demands.

Total. There's total stability. Too much stability sometimes. What I mean is, once you're a teacher, it's almost impossible to get rid of you. Sometimes this is because of a lack of teachers, but often, this is due to the strong unions that support teachers' rights, even the rights of the bad ones. If you're in a job with a private company and you slack off, you're fired almost in a heartbeat. But it seems that even bad teachers are sometimes hard to get rid of because teaching is a profession in demand. And special-education teachers are even harder to come by.

advice

There are three things: organization, humor, and the ability to enforce discipline. Your students are a huge part of it, too, because you have to make your classes relevant to the students. When you're working with people who are different, you also have to be tolerant of others and receptive to others' differences.

The best advice would be to go to a classroom and actually observe what's going on between the students and teachers. Most schools are receptive to allowing visitors in their classrooms, especially students interested in the field. If you primarily want to stand in front of a classroom and teach, special education is probably not a good discipline to enter, it's more collaborative. You work with teachers half the time. And you not only teach material, but you also teach students why you are teaching them the material. Volunteer in a classroom, and see if it's something you could see yourself doing.