MA in English Lit

Sikorsky
Sun, 08 Sep 2013 16:41:05 +0000

With an MA in English literature, I have taught community college English. It’s mostly teaching remedial composition and freshman composition. It’s a lot of work, and not very glamorous. I have great respect for the people who do it well.

I have also taught English in private middle and high schools. If you do this, you’ll still teach a lot of writing, and it’ll be a lot of work, but you will also get to spend some time talking about some of the novels, plays and poems that you went to graduate school to study. (Or maybe not. I spent my time in graduate school focused mostly on Renaissance drama and poetry. The literary portion of high-school English in the U.S. involves a lot of long and short fiction, and a lot of Americans.)

If you want to teach in public schools, you’ll need certification. What that will require will vary from state to state, but you should expect that it could take you another two semesters to earn certification, and you may find some of the requirements off-putting. For example, when I investigated certification in Virginia about twenty years ago, I learned that even though I had just completed an M.A. in English at U.Va., I couldn’t qualify for an endorsement to teach English in a Virginia middle or high school unless I went back to community college to take a course in public speaking. While I was at the community college, in order to earn any teaching certificate, I would also need to take an undergraduate credits in P.E. Three credits of physical education were required for any teaching certificate in Virginia. But I hadn’t earned any credits in P.E. when I was in college; Harvard doesn’t grant any.

Whether you try to teach in private or public schools, I expect you may find that the market is rather glutted. On the other hand, an M.A. from St. Andrews will seem somewhat exotic, and may be something of a plus in private schools, where image and brand-name education tend to be important. So that M.A. may make you a fairly attractive job candidate. (Can you coach? That helps tremendously in private schools.) But the job market for teachers is such that, even though I began my career as a full-time English teacher, because I knew a little science and a little math, I ended up teaching mostly those. Particularly math.