Monday, July 24, 2006

Contemplating my career future...

I'm usually not one to think about my career prospects and advancements, but thoughts of how things will be 10-20 years from now if I stick at it in teaching intrigue me. Will I stay on to be a teacher still and handle the everyday stress of handling kids, their schoolworks and the preparation for lessons? Or will I want to be a high flyer-wannabe and aspire to be HOD? VP? P? Or how about being a curriculum specialists, set new content for teachers to teach and for students to swallow?

Wanting to work with students is the main reason why I joined the teaching profession, and so following any other career paths will take me away from it. However, I wonder if there's a limit to how much of this daily stress I can take - hopefully things can get more comfortable as time goes by.

On the other hand, being a HOD or a person in power gives me the chance to change things for (what I feel is) the better, and the satisfaction of creating great changes and revolutions is uncomparable. That was my reason for wanting to be ODAC president back in NUS days...

Or maybe I can focus on the outdoors and work with MOE to regulate these activities with my skills and knowledge, which will probably be useless to most schools. But it probably doesn't give me the satisfaction of being in the other two positions.

So how?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

you wun have a solution now lah...should just see where things lead to at the end of our bond....in any case, if u go into something that brings u away fr the students, u can always transfer back to teaching when u start missing them...so no worries!

Alex Wong said...

Haha, I think planning and projecting into the future is a good practice to have. I certainly don't want to spend 5 years, look back and wonder what I had done and where I could have been.

Not everything you have a passion for has to be done in your career.... think hybrid! You could go MOE and design cirriculums and still have an outside venue/job for teaching students. Possible right?

Haha... sometimes I think I should follow my own advice... :P

Wolfie said...

Haha...that's the problem...it's easy to dispense advice to others but hard administer them to yourself. So where do you see yourself in 5-10 years' time?