It seems that now is not a good time to be looking into teaching English or History - traditionally over-supplied subjects - in high schools in Ontario.
For the past five years, if the Maclean's and National Post articles on the subject are any guide, teachers in general have had a hard time finding work. This is less true of those teaching technology, sciences, or French, but I am none of those and so there's no need for me to go too far down that road.
The Transition to Teaching 2010 report also paints a bleak picture.
To sum up the report, new teachers across the board were optimistic about their next five years, but largely un- or under- employed.
26% of those new teachers surveyed for this report stated that they had full time contracts, while in 2009 that number was 31%. Piecework is where the teaching jobs seem to be, with about 42.5% working part time, about 39% working with multiple schools, and about 37% working as on-call supply teachers. About 17.5% of new teachers in 2010 were working in non-teaching jobs to pay the bills.
Amidst the Intermediate-Senior certificate holders (my potential peers), 30% are unemployed (or just not working as teachers, I'm guessing), 48% are underemployed (they need to work a non-teaching job to supplement their teaching income), 20% are teaching daily supply, and 30% have regular jobs. Thankfully, I'm not trying or planning to get into teaching math and stats, because I know that those numbers add to something greater than 100 - but that's just how many teachers are out there, I guess.
So, using the Toronto District School Board's collective agreement with the Ontario College of Teachers as a standard for urban earnings, I could expect to make $45,709 a year as a teacher starting out with little or no experience.
That's for full time work.
Part time work is something that I could consider, and realistically I should look into it, but it's not really something that I think I'll be doing. That's also for work in Toronto. The Big Smoke. Ol' TO. But what would I be making in the country? or in the northern reaches of Ontario?
Barrie/Guelph/K-W aren't exactly the rural areas of Ontario, but they aren't Toronto either. In these areas my salary could range from $29,747.20 to $56,320. My calculations are based on this table, a 40 hour work week, and 32 weeks of work per year.
Going further away from TO, I think that it's fair to guess that starting salary for a high school English/History teacher would hover around $45-50,000. But does Northern Ontario, as represented by North Bay and Thunder Bay, hold the standard of living I've come to expect?
Both cities have at least five bookstores that stock used books (though North Bay, surprisingly, seems to have more). They both have a Bulk Barn - essential for cheap groceries). And they both have movie theatres (though North Bay has a non-chain venue with 6$ tickets and a slick site). But Thunder Bay has 16 regular city bus routes while North Bay has only 11.
Blame it on my fascination with Twin Peaks (despite the differences between the NW US and Northern Ontario), but Northern Ontario holds a strange romance to me. Yet, Victoria (and BC itself) also held that - and still does - though living there for 2 years certainly tempered that romance with the province's cold, grey reality.
Working with the Transition to Teaching's 2010 report, it looks like I've got a 3 in 10 chance of landing something full-time right out of teacher's college. Odds that are not particularly strong, but that would improve, slowly but surely (perhaps, optimistically, at 5% a year) over the course of the five years that my internet searching and chatting up friends and relatives who are recent graduates or currently teachers leads me to expect as a wait time between graduation and full time employment.
But all of this becomes most relevant after I've finished teacher's college. What's a standard one year program going to cost?
At the schools that I've applied to, tuition runs the gamut of $6-8,000 for full tuition. Add $1000 for textbooks. Living costs per month sit around $1,500 (based on the fact that most apartments do not have utilities included in their rent). So then, for the full teacher's college experience I would be spending about $27,000. A tidy sum, and one that could see me getting a loan or two.
And now, for the next week, I'll mull over just what these numbers actually mean to me. So check back then for my logical analysis of going to teacher's college. In the meantime, Wednesday's entry will be about pot-popped popcorn and this Friday I'll try to find some good in a film that made a whopping $947 at the US box office: Burke and Hare.
Do you have any stats on teacher's college and/or teaching that I've missed? If so, drop them in the comments.
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