Five RCS Schools Offer Teaching as a Profession Career Pathway

By KEITH RYAN CARTWRIGHT
Rutherford County Schools

It’s often said that teaching is a calling.

Like the teachers who touched their lives, Rutherford County students following the Teaching as a Profession Pathway hope to impact the lives of young people.

“I really didn’t know what I wanted to be until I interacted with those kids,” said Megan Le, a senior at Rockvale High School, who worked with the preschool program at Riverdale High School as a sophomore. “Once I started teaching those activities, I absolutely loved it.

“I just fell in love with teaching.”

DeYonna Perkins, another senior at Rockvale, had a similar experience the first time she taught a lesson to class of third-graders at Rockvale Elementary.

“When I taught my first class and everything just flowed and it was perfect,” Perkins recalled, “I was like, ‘Yeah, this is it.’”

Afterward, while sitting alone in her car, Perkins “felt like I had accomplished something.”

Like Rockvale, Eagleville is now offering teaching as a profession; while Riverdale, Oakland and Smyrna high schools have offered the program since its inception. Griffin has 120 students in the program at Rockvale with 50 in-person and 70 enrolled as distance-learners.

Teaching as a profession originated in 2011 as one course offered by Rutherford County Schools before evolving into a full pathway that provides students a huge advantage because it offers hands-on, real-world experience in a classroom.

The pathway consists of four courses.

Three of those classes — Fundamentals of Education (level one), Teaching as Profession 1 (level two) and Teaching as a Profession 2 (level three) — are offered at Rockvale. There is a work-based learning component for students who reach level two and three that takes place within an elementary or middle school.

“It’s kind of like a residency one, residency two,” said Griffin, who is in her 17th year of teaching and hopes to reassess the work study option after Fall break. “Very blessed to be able to teach something that is real life and it’s something that I’m very passionate about.”

Incidentally, Griffin was a member of the committee that helped write the standards.

Le originally thought she would teach kindergarten or first grade, but she is now thinking about fifth or sixth grades and even high school as an option; while Perkins is certain she will teach history at the middle school level.

The pandemic has done little to dissuade either from pursuing teaching as a profession.

“Being away from school made me realize the bond I had with my peers and teachers too,” said Le, who yearns for a day when she can inspire students the way she was inspired back in third grade. “This whole situation just made me really value the relationships I had with the people that I work with and I want to kind of use that to build relationships with my future students.”

Perkins added. “I always look forward to being able to teach.”

She noted a “sense of accomplishment” and “responsibility” as two motivators for teaching.

Both Perkins and Le have felt that way since early childhood.

“I feel incredibly fortunate to have found my passion for (teaching) so early,” concluded Le, who is expected to apply to the College of Education at Middle Tennessee State University. “I know even some (college) students that still don’t know what they want to do. I’m really fortunate that I can already plan my next few years.

“I’m going to go to college and I’m going to get a master’s degree in education.”