School Counselor – One Male's Perspective
Helping a fellow student resolve a math problem sparked his interest in being a teacher. Ironically, his career in education eventually involved a title change away from ‘teacher’ but the students he counseled often let him know that he was, overall, their favorite teacher.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
SF is the youngest of two children; the oldest, his sister, eventually became a graphic and website designer. SF’s father hoped that his son, SF, would follow into the banking business, primarily involving responsibilities for the accuracy of the bank’s stock trading. SF, who never completely understood the details of his father’s job responsibilities, had no interest in that career path.
The mother of SF worked at a series of different jobs, often related to the time she could be away from child raising and homemaker responsibilities. Thus, she was, at different times, a preschool teacher and later, a librarian within the children’s section.
SF was indirectly influenced by his parents for his career choices by observing that both parents worked hard to do their best. He remains grateful that they exerted no specific career choice pressure, letting him make his own decisions.
CHILDHOOD
During his childhood, SF focused his activities on playing baseball and basketball. Not a running enthusiast, on the high school track team his specialty was the high jump. While not a team activity requiring coordination of concurrent movements among several players, SF always enjoyed the camaraderie of being with teammates, win or lose.
EDUCATION
Following high school graduation, SF enrolled at the main campus of a large state university, where his love of history led to majoring in social studies plus education courses as he began to narrow his career path choice to being a teacher.
FIRST JOB IS NEVER A BINDING CAREER COMMITMENT
After earning his Bachelor’s degree and certification to teach any grade between 7 and 12, SF found a teaching job in a small, remote town bordering a large bay. He enjoyed teaching favorite subject matters of U.S. history and geography.
FIRST CHALLENGES LED TO NEW CAREER FOCUS
As students should realize and teachers well know, a teacher’s job cannot be effectively accomplished by ignoring the behavior of the students in the classroom. The job is easy when the students are interested in the subject matter and emotionally mature to pay attention. But even within generally interesting course topics, there will be occasional boring aspects. And the teacher’s job becomes difficult when adolescent immaturity takes over student brains, causing disruption for a few or possibly everyone in the classroom, students and teacher alike.
Another reality for teachers is that they must live somewhere other than within the school building. Like any other job or career, where to live becomes a personal, lifestyle issue, the range of which is essentially dictated by where the teacher can find a job: city, suburbs or remotely rural?
SF’s choice of residence was limited – unless he opted for a long commute from a distant location – to the remotely rural area surrounding his school district. As a young bachelor who had not grown up in the area and thus had no long-time-established friends’ group, SF longed for a better work / life balance incorporating an interesting career with an interesting social scene. Such a balance was not possible with SF’s current teaching job, so he resigned after completing his first year of teaching.
STEPPING BACK FROM THE FIRST CAREER PATH MAY BE ‘UNSETTLING’ UNTIL DEVELOPING A ‘PLAN B’
When SF made the difficult decision to quit his employment, he had not yet developed an alternate plan, known as a ‘Plan B’. Without a new direction (which might further develop into a Plan C, then D), SF felt “a little (mentally) lost” because what he had decided to do – and invested both time and money training to do – “wasn’t working out.” One analogy was ‘like a ship without a rudder’ – drifting……… having left both a job and a residence, without a definite Plan B.
(Editor’s note – There is a difference between ‘feeling lost’ for a short period of time and ‘depression’ – symptoms of the latter include low-level anxiety, sleeplessness, inability to focus for extended periods, quick to anger, increasing dependence on drugs or alcohol, etc. When any such symptoms persist, ‘invest in your mental health’ by seeking professional counseling from a psychologist or psychiatrist.)
To give himself some positive new direction, SF made an easy decision: return to a more populated suburban area to reside with a long-time friend and take a job related to working with teenagers, though not specifically as an educator: an assistant within a YMCA ‘after care’ program.
This job involved daily contact with – and supervision of – elementary school-aged children. While those children were rarely discipline problems, SF began to realize that he would rather work with students with whom he could engage in a different level of mental maturity, which equated to high school-age students.
Having also concluded that his long-range goal was to return to full-time education but not as a teacher, SF decided to limit employment to part-time (requiring living more frugally) while finding a well-regarded graduate school – conveniently located with less than an hour’s driving time from his home – which offered courses and a degree in school counseling. This met his revised career criteria: pursue qualification for a counseling career within a geographic area providing opportunities to socialize with like-minded people.
While pursuing his counseling degree, a university adviser suggested to SF that he expand his eventual counseling certifications to include both high school and post-secondary options. SF easily accepted these recommendations since he had always wanted to work with older students.
After earning his graduate degree in counseling with secondary school certification, including serving two internships in suburban, public-school districts, SF found a job opening as a long-term substitute counselor for grades 6 through 8, within a small, private, urban school. He enjoyed working with this age group of children, both females and males.
SATISFACTORY CAREERS WILL LIKELY INVOLVE CONTINUING CHALLENGES
When the substitute post was no longer available because the counselor whose position SF had filled during a sabbatical returned, SF was glad to find a permanent job within a well-regarded, suburban public-school setting, involving both females and males where about 70% of the graduates continue their education at 4-year schools and 20% enroll in trade schools.
SF embarked on his current, long term (17 years and continuing, as of 2024) school counseling position, continuously willing to recognize and overcome any challenges because he loves the greater parts of the work which constitutes his career.
Like virtually every type of career – alphabetically from agriculture through arts, athletics, education, engineering, entertainment, government, healthcare, law, manufacturing, sales, science and technology to writing, there will be challenges to meet and overcome while you enjoy the main parts of your career. Thus, while school counselors have no classroom management responsibilities, their unique challenge is finding ways to be effective while working with an assigned number of students far more than professional guidelines. For example, the American School Counselor’s Association (ASCA) recommends a ratio of 250 students to each school counselor. However, SF’s assigned counseling caseload usually approximates 325 students. (Actual ratio numbers vary among academic years due to multiple factors including total grade level enrollment plus local and state funding levels.)
SF’s public school district utilizes the wise counseling strategy of matching counselors with the same students for their journey from ninth through twelfth grades.
To get to know each of his assigned students beyond learning their names and class schedules, SF arranges two annual 15-to-30-minute individual sessions. The first is scheduled during the fall (“Let’s review your grades; how’s it going? Any problems?”). The second private meeting is scheduled toward the end of winter – same questions plus helping to select courses if not seniors heading toward graduation. As needed, SF will offer a third meeting.
The more students to work with, the less time available to devote to each one. Always, SF tries to be proactive while encouraging students to deal with their own challenges (e.g. homework, ‘tough’ courses, bullies).
Sometimes SF concludes he doesn’t know a student well enough to make specific recommendations among the general options: further education, workforce, military, internship, gap year, volunteer or “sit on your butt and do nothing” – the latter alternative is the only one for which he provides a strong, negative recommendation.
CAREER SATISFACTION
Career satisfaction occurs for SF daily. While there will always be known challenges, each day brings the opportunity for involvement in unanticipated events.
Sometimes wishing there was a way to follow each student’s path forward, perhaps involving zigs and zags, SF has learned to be content with the minimal news randomly received. In the meantime, SF is pleased to have been voted multiple times by his senior class, their “Impact Teacher” – an irony not lost on SF, who thought he had decided to no longer be a teacher, only a counselor.
