Day 7
The Praxis, The VCLA & Educate VA
While this blog is mainly about starting my new business, I am also about to begin the process of being certified to teach high school Business & Marketing in the state of Virginia. So on Day 7 of the 100 Days of Business, i participated in a webinar for the career swticher teaching program to ensure I make the final preparations for my application to get into the program.
Due to a shortage of teachers in the country, the government has made it a little bit easier to switch careers and become a teacher. Instead of having to go back to college, there are certain programs that will “speed along” the process. The program I am doing is called Educate VA (approved by the VA Department of Education) and the webinar gave me a chance to go over the prerequisites of entering the program.
(Keep in mind this is specific to the state of Virginia)
Bachelor’s Degree With A GPA Of At Least A 2.5 ✓
This is the most interesting prerequisite because the Department of Education doesn’t care that I have a graduate degree, or that my GPA for my MBA was 3.8. Graduate degrees are meaningless here, and no matter how long ago it was, your undergrad GPA has to be over 2.5. Let’s just say mine…was.
Oh, and your degree does not have to have anything to do with what you want to teach. So I could be a gym teacher, despite being a marketing major.
Professional Work Experience Of 3 Years ✓
The interesting part about this prerequisite, is that, like your college major, your job experience does not have to relate to what you want to teach. Mine does. I have (wow) like 15 years of experience with business and marketing.
Pass The Praxis Test For The Subject You Want To Teach ✓
I want to be a marketing teacher, so I had to take the marketing (5561) Praxis test. It is recommended that you study for “at least a month”, but really, it took about 4 days of reading through and taking notes from the study guide I purchased to pass the test. My score, was a 183 out of 200, which was well above the average. My experience, and my MBA studies really may have made this a lot easier.
After I get into the program, and before I get a job as a teacher, there is a 2nd praxis test I will need to take called Business Information and Technology (5101), but I’ll talk about that another time.
By the way, if I failed this test, I would be able to retake it, but not until it was too late to push back the process 6 months. The same goes for the next test, so, glad I’m good at test taking!
Pass the Virginia Communication & Literacy (VCLA) Test ✓
The VCLA basically shows that you can read and write well enough to teach high school, not well enough to be an author.
The reading section was incredibly easy. There really was no way to “study” for it that I could tell. Perhaps the study guide helped me, but I got 93% of these multiple choice questions right.
The writing section was a little more difficult due to bad habits formed over time. Placement of commas, spelling errors, and grammar issues like “which vs that”, “Who, Whose Whom” and other things that still boggle people to this day were some of the things I needed to re-learn. I passed the multiple choice part with a not so amazing 82%.
The final part of the writing section included some additional types of questions, and a short and long essay. By the time I got to the essays, I had something like 3 hours left on the time limit (the reading was so easy/fast). I perfected my short essay so much that I ran out of time on the long essay. I was very unhappy with it and thought that it might cause me to fail. If I failed, I would be behind 6 months!
So there was a bit of nervousness when I opened up the score report 11 days later (the wait was a killer). It turns out I passed it fairly easily.
Professional Essay ✓
“Reflecting on your previous educational and work experiences, what skills do you believe will serve you well as a future teacher?”
750 words to answer this question. I love teaching. I’ve coached sports. I’ve made instructional videos. Heck I even taught Realtors how to make videos during these 100 days. No issues here.
For the next few days I’ll fill out all the rest of the forms and put together my application packet. The due date is in about a month, but I’ll be sending it in this week in case there are any issues. The webinar from EducateVA was very helpful in answering questions about the process. Next up, getting into the program officially!
I don’t really have any “key takeaways” for this day except to always prepare early and don’t wait until the last minute to do things.
Action Items:
Turn in application on Thursday