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Broadcasting, including Public Broadcasting from North Carolina, dried up for me in 1998.  I retrained to become a teacher.  I was then told that it took 15 years to become an "effective teacher."  I just turned 57 and did the math.  I received plenty of good to excellent observations, but was layed off because of funding and lack of students in my small school system.  I was urged to earn a Master's degree and teach adult learners.  I worked part time at a local community college and loved it.  My wife (a respiratory therapist was recruited by Salem Hospital, so we moved to Oregon.  We've been here for a year.  I have discovered that I have the wrong kind of Master's in order to teach here.  Public and private secondary schools, where I have the most experience requires a MEd.  They are laying off English teachers and there seems to be a freeze at the community college level.  I have decided to go back in and get the MEd. with an English Teaching of Speakers of Other Language certification.  I will be 62 when that happens.  I have no hope for retirement, I just want to teach in Oregon.  The only bright side of my situation is that I will probably be dead before I get a chance to pay back all my student loans (over $100,000).  My advice would be take any job a person to get.  Decades of experience in a field or advance degrees mean little or nothing unless one is willing to move to North Dakota or Alaska.

posted 2 years, 11 months ago
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I began as a radio announcer in commercial radio while earning a journalism degree.  I moved on to Public Radio and Television, living from grant to grant and running a small media production business.  I loved it, until it stopped paying a living wage.  I went back to school and became an secondary school English teacher to learn what real poverty and extremely long hours were all about.   I earned a Master's degree and taught at the community college teaching English and loved it, until the recession hit.  After moving to Oregon, I found that I was underqualified to teach anywhere, so I am back in school.  If this new effort at a Master's degree in special education fails to land a job for me, I will begin thinking of myself as retired.

posted 2 years, 11 months ago
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