Career Education 8

Day 5 - Life - It's Complicated Write Up

Task Learning Intention:

To understand how the choices we make in our personal lives, in our communities and in our education affect our career paths.

Take your notes from the interview and share the story of your interviewee. For inspiration look at the Life - It's Complicated examples for Mrs. Claus and Mr. Jeffery. You can choose to do this as a timeline or as an essay.
If you are typing your response it should be:

• Roughly one page
• Double spaced
• 12 pt font
• In Calibri or Cambria or Times New Roman

Once you have finished look over and finalize any other outstanding work.

Mrs. Claus grew up in a family where both her parents were teachers. She thought that she would probably end up being a teacher because she enjoyed babysitting and teaching kids in a club setting. In high school, she followed the university entrance path of courses, taking Calculus in grade 12. She also had a grade 12 English teacher that really encouraged her to write. When she needed to choose what to study at university, she decided to study Journalism.

    Mrs. Claus looked at what universities had a Journalism program and found that the University of Regina had a Journalism program. She needed to take two years of university courses in order to apply for the Journalism program, so she decided to take these courses in her hometown at Brandon University. She took Calculus, English, German, Psychology and Linear Algebra. She found that she enjoyed and was better at the Math courses than the English one, and so after her first year of university, she decided that she wouldn’t apply for Journalism. She decided that being a teacher was what she had wanted to do earlier and that she would become a teacher instead. Mrs. Claus then continued with English and Psychology courses, but majored in Math. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science.

    When the time came to start her Education Degree, she briefly considered attending a different university to get a variety of experiences, but eventually chose to stay in her hometown. She knew the town and the people well and she could save money by living near her parents.

    She graduated with her Education Degree and taught high school math for a few years. She also stayed home with her kids for a few years and now she is back at work, teaching high school math and high performance sports and nutrition and sports psychology courses.

As a teenager he wanted to be either a biochemist or a video game designer. He took classes for both options in Grade 10 and 11, but settled on going to university for Computer Science as a grade 12 student. In his spare time he taught himself coding in PHP, Perl, Python, C++, ASP, Visual Basic, HTML and Java. He applied for the University of Waterloo in Ontario and due to a miscommunication the wrong set of grades was sent over. As he was trying to figure things out with the university he was accepted into UNBC with a scholarship and decided to pursue that instead.

At university he did a work experience placement in Information Technology at the Yukon College. As part of this he helped out with a summer computer camp for kids and realized he preferred working with kids rather than being stuck in the dark with computers. Back at university the next year he began taking courses to get into the teaching program at UNBC or UBC-Okanagan. His aim was now to become a middle school teacher. When the middle schools in Prince George were all closed he had to decide between becoming trained as an elementary school teacher or a secondary school teacher. He ended up choosing elementary.

From there he graduated out of the UNBC program and began working at Highglen Montessori Elementary School. When the school burned down in 2013 he moved from the classroom into the teacher-librarian job and began working on a Masters Degree in Educational Practice. In 2016 he took over as teacher-librarian at Prince George Secondary School and changed his focus to a Masters Degree in Education focusing on curriculum and pedagogy.

Throughout this time the skills he needed for these different jobs are diverse, but do overlap. To be a biochemist, a teacher, or a video game designer all require the ability to work under pressure, get things done by a deadline, and be able to work with other people as part of a bigger team. What is different for each one is what you are working with on a day to day basis. For a biochemist you are working with formulas and chemicals, for a video game designer you are working with code and assets, and in teaching you are working with human beings.

He briefly considered being a teacher in grade 7, but after that it never crossed his mind until that summer in the Yukon.