Troops Finding New Service as Teachers

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Troops Finding New Service as Teachers

By BERNIE BECKER
Published: December 5, 2009


WASHINGTON — In her last job in the Air Force, Tammie Langley gave prospective pilots and navigators an introduction to aeronautics. Four years later, Ms. Langley is in a different sort of classroom, teaching sixth graders in North Carolina everything from reading to math.

The settings may be radically different, but Ms. Langley said the transition from teaching 22-year-olds to teaching 11- or 12-year-olds had been fairly seamless. “Either way, you still have to kind of wipe their noses a bit and kick them in the behind every now and then,” said Ms. Langley, who is in her second year at Kannapolis Intermediate School, about 25 miles north of Charlotte.

Ms. Langley, 36, became a schoolteacher in large part because of Troops to Teachers, a federal program that, over 15 years, has helped about 12,000 former service members transition into second careers in the classroom. Now, a bipartisan group in Congress is hoping to expand the program to allow more veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to sign up, while also increasing the number of places in which they could find employment.

Not all of the veterans who enter the classroom with the help of Troops to Teachers, some of whom are up to a generation older than teachers starting right out of college, share Ms. Langley’s background in formal instruction. But the program’s supporters and participants say that military service in general provides the sort of discipline and life experiences that translate well to teaching.

“My very first sergeant said, ‘Practice doesn’t make perfect,’ ” said Moises Perez, 50, a social studies teacher in Clayton County, Ga., who spent nearly 24 years in the Army, including service in Afghanistan. “He said, ‘Perfect practice makes perfect.’ That’s what I want to teach the kids.”

C. Emily Feistritzer, president of the National Center for Education Information, said: “We’re finding that these teachers seem to be able to really manage a classroom from the start, which is the biggest problem a lot of teachers have going in. And they come in thinking all children can learn, without any sort of socioeconomic biases.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/education/06troops.html?hp