When the dot-com bubble burst and her high-tech company failed last year, Susan Steele, 60, wondered what to do with the rest of her working years. She decided on teaching and looked forward to the start of this school year.
But after four days at Lansdowne High School in southwest Baltimore County, Steele couldn't sleep. Her classes were crowded, her students restless, and the work just never stopped.
So she quit.
Although her experience is an extreme example, it illustrates the problems with hiring former fighter pilots, business people, computer programmers and others who are changing careers - an increasingly popular way that school systems across Maryland and the nation are addressing critical shortages of teachers.
"Career changers", according to some educational experts and the nation's top two teachers unions, don't know how to teach and don't last as educators.
Furthermore, on the Eastern Shore, a program to hire career changers failed after many candidates recoiled when they realized the demands on a teacher - night and weekend activities, lesson planning, grading papers and disciplining students.
"The world these people are going into is very different from the one they left," said Leslie Getzinger, spokeswoman for the million-member American Federation of Teachers. "You could be a brilliant economist, but if you don't know how to teach that knowledge to 17-year-olds with discipline problems in 50 minutes, you're not going to be able to teach them anything. You have to have the skills, and you need to be supported when you're there."
For years, virtually all teachers came directly from college programs. No longer. Many school systems, especially urban districts losing large numbers of experienced teachers to their suburban counterparts, are struggling to find enough educators.
With help and money from federal, state and local agencies, more than 50,000 career changers became new teachers from 1983 to 1996, according to the National Center for Education Information, a research group in Washington that recently issued a 432-page report on the trend. The organization estimates that an additional 30,000 began teaching this fall nationwide.
"The biggest change in the teaching profession is this huge population of people who came from other careers," said Emily Feistritzer, president of the center.
