I've decided to become a teacher

Anyone who knows me has heard my many rants about wanting to become a teacher -- ad nauseum. A few days ago -- in one of those epiphanic moments usually reserved for badly written made-for-TV movies, I finally decided I was done talking about it, and thinking about it, and talking about thinking about it, and thinking about thinking about it.

I decided to become a teacher.

I won't go into my entire story (at least not right now), for sake of brevity -- but in short, I'm 33 and have been in the IT industry (i.e. I play with computers in a corporate environment all day) for 11+ years and I am going to toss that all aside and pursue a career as a high school English teacher in the Bronx.

This past Tuesday, I applied to the NYC Teaching Fellows (NYCTF) program. This program is one of the various "alternative" routes to teaching in New York City. It has a fast-track training program for new teachers, subsidizes a huge chunk of the cost of your Masters degree (which is required to teach in NYC), and they do a host of other things to boot. I applied for the 2009 school year -- which would have my training start in June of '09, and teaching beginning the fall of '09.

This is not a done deal, of course. Even if I get accepted to the program, I've given myself at least half a year (until March or April) to actually pull the chord on the whole computer career thing.

Standing between me and the classroom are three main issues:

1. I have to get accepted to the NYCTF program
2. I have to do my own research (and soul searching, of course) and make sure I really, in fact want to do this, and want to do it via the NYCTF program
3. I have to make sure that, financially speaking, this whole thing is even possible. There's a mortgage to pay, you know.

I'll be blogging about each of these 3 issues individually.

Oh, why the blog?? -- Hell, I'm realistic about this, I might have an anti-epiphany two months from now and drop the whole idea, who knows. But I thought it would be interesting to have a place to record my thoughts as I weave my way through this ridiculous little adventure.

That's all for now.

Wish me luck.