Looking for advice (for a newbie)

Hi Teachers,

I’m looking to get into teaching and looking for some advice here, more so how to go about doing it right than anything else.

• About me: 33M, taught English in Korea for ~5 years, then ran a restaurant, realized my true passion was to impart knowledge to kids after all. My favorite experience was teaching high school kids.

Here’s what the research has shown me so far, please correct me if I’m wrong on any of this:

• There’s a teacher shortage pretty much everywhere (good for getting in!) but it’s not always for good reasons (low pay, poorly run, overcrowded, stressful, etc).
• Each school district is unique in how they’re run and what they need. How can I figure out where to look and what they need? This seems like one of those situations where you need to already be on the inside to know the "culture" of the school/district, what admin is like, etc. Is there another way to figure this out?
• You can get a provisional teaching license in many states and work towards getting your full license. Wondering if this means you can get inside a classroom straight away aka hit the ground running?
• There are some states that I’ve been told (almost unanimously) to avoid. Oklahoma, Arizona, Hawaii, NC, and a few others. I wonder what you all thought about this. I personally think those are exactly the states I should head to in order to start my career since that’s where the opportunities would be? But I’ll admit that I don’t know what I don’t know.
• I was a good student (perfect SATI and II scores, various APs) so I actually don’t have any strong preference for which subjects to teach since I can teach a lot of them. Would it help me to choose a subject that’s in high-demand/high-shortage? I’m seeing Math/Science/STEM/SPED/Foreign Languages come up the most.

My plan is to narrow down a list of places with shortages and reach out to the schools there. But I feel like I'm approaching this as if it’s the private sector and I’ve heard it’s not the same at all. Am I doing this right? Thanks for any and all help.

Submitted October 22, 2019 at 08:19AM by Skunk-As-A-Drunk https://ift.tt/2qBn4fx