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Do you love to read or love to write? Then, maybe becoming an English teacher may be right for you, or maybe not. Either way, if you are an English major, I recommend taking the Education courses in college. Even if you never teach, many of the lessons you learn in these courses will help you. It's like the Mastercard commercial, they are "Priceless."

We all have our own reasons for selecting English as our college major. Once you have made that decision, next comes the more difficult decision. What are you going to do with it? Start taking Education courses immediately. Even if teaching is not the direction you want to go initially, these courses supplement details within your Engish degree and will make you stronger.

If you have decided that being an English Teacher is your career path, there are a few things I need to warn you about:

Teaching English has to be the most time consuming of the high school curriculum. Besides your initial hours of reading, research and lesson planning, you also have the grading of homework. Occasionally, you can give easy fill in the blank or scantron answers, but most of the time you will want to assign longer written answers to inspire the students to use their own creativity to develop answers and to improve their writing skills. You will spend hours preparing for a lesson and even longer correcting the papers.

Inspiring teenagers to be involved in the book you are reading or the material your presenting is difficult. With English, it is harder to tap into the "When will I use this beyond high school" mentality. For example, can the student still be successful in the workplace without ever reading Huck Finn? Of course! However, the point of English class is not necessarily which particular book you are reading, it is about the lessons found within the cover. The more you read, the better you write. You naturally pick this up. Some students will not question your material selections (or the school districts selections). However, students are bolder than years past and at least one will test you.

Keeping your lesson plans creative can be difficult. With English you can create all kinds of creative lesson plans for when a book is completed that get the class motivated. But, how do you keep your lessons creative when reading a book you anticipate the class to take 3 weeks to read? Sometimes you can have the class read aloud, but then you can't assign outside reading because everyone will be in a different spot for the next day. You can have silent reading after a day of reading aloud so everyone can read at their own pace. Then what do you do? You can make sure students have read to a certain chapter and discuss fundamentals found up to that point and have a lecture. Then do you give extra reading time? Or do you work on grammar like most teachers I had growing up? We would be reading a novel and to change up the class-time, the teacher would throw in bits and pieces of grammar at us. (Because the grammar wasn't taught uniformly, I learned more about grammar in my Education classes in College than in school). As a teacher, this is your dilemma to work out.

Now being an English Teacher does have its rewards as well. Each teacher's rewards are different, but after you have done a good job, you can walk away knowing you have just inspired our next generation. Even if the students didn't like the material, some of the lessons you taught must have sunk in and will help mold adulthood.

Learn more about this author, Bobbi Stonskas.
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