The best job in education?
During lunch, I was talking jobs with a soon-to-be PhD graduate who is defending next semester. He claims that he would prefer a teaching position at Stuyvesant High School over a tenure-track position at any Ivy League college. Now, I think that is a bit extreme.
Sure, Stuyvesant is the second best high school in New York City, but tenure at an Ivy is pretty much the holy grail of any academic. Plus, you would need to either win the lottery or marry someone very rich if you plan on paying off four years of undergrad and eight years of full-time grad study on a NYC public school teacher salary. His counter-claim is that at Stuyvesant, you would get to deal with a class of people far smarter than the "spoiled brats" you typically run into on an Ivy campus. In addition, (he claims that) if you are interested in teaching, you won't find a sweeter deal than you would at Stuy, since any good university would expect you to do a great amount of research and publish an even greater amount of papers, in order to earn your keep. I almost agree with him, although I don't know why you would want to go for second best, when number one is just a few short stops away, in the Bronx.
So the question is - do you go the traditional course and aim for tenure at a university, and put up with all the grunt ... err... research work that goes along with it. Or, do you try for a teaching job at a top high-school?
10 Comments:
As a Stuy alum, I want to warn your friend that Stuy has the uber-competitiveness and kids trying to find whatever ways to cheat on exams. I enjoyed it, but there certainly were a fair share of spoiled brats
"Sure, Stuyvesant is the second best high school in New York City," Sentences like this keep me coming back to your blog, your unwavering elitism, however sincere, never ceases to amuse.
>> Sure, Stuyvesant is the second best high school in New York City
you are lucky you are cute. and, NO YOU DIDNT.
1. I am completely flattered that our lunch conversation has been immortalized in the blog. I am not kidding.
2. I believe what I actually said was that not everyone at an Ivy League school will be from Stuyvesant. Maybe that's not what I actually said, but I am saying it now, because it's much wittier than whatever I came up with before.
3. My bad, second best high school. But I live downtown, and hate to commute.
andrew you're full of crap. they couldn't pay me enough to teach at stuyvesant. i think i would feel dirty walking over that bridge every day.
but, getting back to the proposed question - if i were getting a phd, i would want to teach at a university. i don't think i could deal with the administrative crap of the department of education.
I love a good Stuy pile-on, even if it is off-topic. Most Stuy grads I've meet are strangely unbalanced.
My standard reaction to hearing a classmate went to Stuy: "oh, you're one of those."
you say elitist, i say charming
i say charming too... especially when you consider how completely UN-elitist she is about college and grad school. most people would be the opposite.
That's because I really wanted to go to Princeton.
you ONLY hear if a classmate went to stuy or science, or maybe tech. most other 20+ year olds don't talk about where they went to high school.
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