I work about 10 minutes from there. Is that the one behind Maxim Market?
Fairfax County School System in Northern Virginia, and Montgomery County School System in Maryland. These are suburbs of Washington, D.C. They have a high tax base, therefore money for their schools, and that is supposed to translate into good school systems. When I was a kid in the 1970 & 1980’s, Fairfax County Schools were considered in the top 5 in the nation - not sure where they rank now. There are pockets of immigrants in these counties as well. Lot’s of Spanish speakers from Central America, Vietnamese, and Korean, and Middle Easterners and West African immigrants.
Fairfax County Schools: http://www.fcps.k12.va.us/jobs.htm?sa=X
Montgomery County Schools: http://www.mcps.k12.md.us/
Check out Newsweek Magazine’s Top 100 Public Highschools:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8759025/site/newsweek/
Northern Virginia highschool: ranks #5, H-B Woodlawn in Arlington, Virginia; #23 George Mason in Falls Church, VA; W.T. Woodson in Fairfax, VA; Washington-Lee in Arlington, VA; Thomas Jefferson in Annandale, VA; Langley in McLean, VA; Yorktown in Arlington, VA; Robinson in Fairfax, VA; Clarke County in Berryville, VA (this is horse country, beautiful, rural); Chantilly in Chantilly, VA
Maryland highschool: ranks #11, Richard Montgomery in Rockville, Maryland; #17 Wootton also in Rockville, MD; #29 Bethesda-Chevy Chase in Bethsda, MD; Churchill in Potomac, MD; Walter Johnson in Bethesda, MD
Best of luck,
Bodo
sorry, been busy, but yeah, it’s back behind Maxim. My wife (TW) loves the place and says its pretty much what she grew up eating.
I knew that Danimal lived in the greater DC area, but do you also live in the area redandy?
Hmmm. . . maybe we (redandy, Danimal) should plan a rendevouz at Bob’s Noodles 66. I have NEVER been able to find a decent place to get Chinese food. Every restaurant in the area that I’ve been to has the typical American-style ultra sweet “Chinese” food - yuck!
Bodo
Except that it requires a LOT of money to get yourself set up in that area…and it is difficult to get someone to rent an apartment to you without a “rental history” in the States. (I relocated to the metro DC area from Taiwan and it was very difficult). The cost of living is very high there too and traffic…terrible.
For public school teaching, the key element is your principal. Even within the same school district or county, different schools at the same level (high schools, elementary schools, etc.) vary wildly. The biggest single factor is your principal. When I taught HS in the States, I was fortunate to have a really excellent principal who didn’t put up with any $hit from the kids, and teachers’ decisions and discipline was backed up. My then-husband decided teaching looked like a cushy gig (yeah, right – he changed his tune after about a week but by then it was too late! :roflmao: ) and got a job in a different high school in the same district…his principal was admittedly not as much on the ball as the one where I was teaching (plus my ex was not really into the whole work-ethic thing, to be fair!) but his experience was totally different from mine, and even given our personal differences, the principals were a big factor. The principal should be the hands-on manager of the school, so his or her style means a lot.
Lots of good adivce here, though I think it’s hard to give good information without knowing more about what you’re used to.
If you’re interested in teaching in California, you can try http://www.teachcalifornia.org for certification info. If you want to scout for jobs and get an idea of the certification/salary you can go to http://edjoin.org/.
As for the discipline nightmares that have been brought up, I agree that it depends on the principal/administrators you work with. I’ve worked in east Los Angeles County and have been lucky to have reliable procedures to count on when kids get out of line. And if any student were to injure a teacher during class like the way described in the earlier post, the student would be taken away in handcuffs to the local police station for processing.
Here is my experience.
I lived in Seattle and went to public elementary school and middle school. In public elementary schools there were metal detectors at the doors, security guards and drugs… drugs everywhere, fights everyday. And that was just middleschool (ages 12-14).
I went to a private highschool, and everything was much better.
If you want to stay out of that stuff, go to a small town, or out of the main center of the City. Schools in the Suburbs tend to be a lot more… innocent than schools in the inner city.
If you can score a job at a private school, go for it, the pay tends to be worse and you don’t get any gov’t benefits.
Ungud. I wer edjukatid in the us escuela.
In reality it depends heavily if your area is rich or not. I happened to be raised in a wealthy-ish area but the school still wasn’t that great. By the numbers it was none of the top High Schools in the US, but it was run by a strange racist leadership. Intolerance and unfairness run rampant there. Currently my old school district is in a battle in the US Supreme Court concerning it’s reluctance to pay for special needs students.
I went to Arlington HS in La Grangeville, New York.