A Mid-life Change of Profession

At age 45 it took courage for Ms. Moffett to become a teacher. She was accustomed to orderly workdays as a secretary to a Wall Street law firm, in a comfortable office with a view of New York harbor. She gave it up last summer, $60,000 salary and all, to take a crash course in teaching, culminating in a battery of certification exams, offered by the New York City Board of Education, in a program designed to fill vacancies in the City's most troubled public schools. Now she finds herself assigned, in her teaching debut, to the first grade at P.S. 92 in Brooklyn, in a working-class neighborhood populated by a growing number of immigrants with limited knowledge of English. The school, having gone through five principals in as many years, is on the Chancellor's danger list, threatened with closure unless its students, nearly three-quarters of whom read below grade level, raise their scores on standardized tests. Along with her new job Ms. Moffett has accepted a cut in pay that will force on her a number of economies, including an exchange of her apartment in Manhattan for a more modest one in Brooklyn.

She has no regrets so far. As a legal secretary she led what she describes as a pleasant life with little risk, a role in which she was not, in her words, "the kind of person I wanted to be, character-wise." Long a believer in the importance of teaching, when she heard about the City's expedited program for recruiting new members to the profession, she signed up right away, thinking that her own "authenticity" would be in question unless she seized this chance to make the career switch and accompanying sacrifice. "This school and these children, they may take everything I have," she says, "but there's really a deep well in me, and it's time to draw on it."

Gone is her even-paced, childless existence, with the 9-to-5 work schedule devoted to administrative tasks. These days she gets up at at 5 a.m. and sometimes labors on lesson plans well into the night, feeling as if she ought not to take the time for sleep. After school she and a fellow teacher, in whom she has found a confidant, go over the day's events and buck each other up. Due to his help, and moreover, to her own enthusiasm, aptitude and diligence, her skills as an instructor and classroom manager are improving. Despite the tardiness and discipline problems, the currently substandard performance of her first-graders, her goal is to have every one of them reading by the end of the school year. This is a tall order, especially for a novice teacher with meager formal preparation. Rather than counting Ms. Moffett out, however, take heart from what she hopes to accomplish by her mid-life change of profession.

Based on a front page article in the New York Times of Sept. 28, 2000.

-- Bob Pomerance