<p>I am beginning my MA in English Lit at the University of St. Andrews and am now having serious reservations about it. My original goals where to get a Ph.D and teach at a collegiate level but the job prospects are so dismal. My question is with a MA in English Lit at what level can I teach. And if I decide to teach at a high school level what additional classes would I need in addition to my MA in English.</p>
<p>Just to clarify, I a studying abroad at the University of St. Andrews. My questions about teaching are for here in the states.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.) </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Even community college teaching is becoming very competitive with an MA. As academic positions dry up, PhD holders who couldn’t get tenure-track positions at four-year institutions are getting academic positions at community colleges. They mostly hold the new tenure-track positions at two-year colleges; most tenured MA-holders come from an earlier era. Sometimes you can get adjunct work, but you get paid per class and no benefits, not even an office in most places. It’s not a good way to make a living alone; it’s more made for people with other full-time jobs.</p>
<p>Private an independent schools are definitely a possibility. I’ve talked to several humanities PhD holders (mostly English and history) and they say that the bright, driven students at their prestigious private schools aren’t that much different from freshman and sophomore students in college anyway. At a private school you will also likely have more autonomy than you would have in a public school, and may even get to teach more of your interests. Public schools typically focus on the basics (American literature, British literature) whereas in private school you may get to teach classes like “The Stories of Literature” or “Creative Nonfiction” or “Writing the Universe of Discourse” (all classes taken from the course list at Philips Academy at Andover). A quick perusal of the faculty at some of the nation’s top private schools shows that even there, the vast majority of teachers have an MA in English (and I even saw St. Andrews pop up).</p>
<p>Are you an undergraduate student or postgraduate student at St Andrew’s? In Scottish universities the MA is the ordinary undergraduate degree, equivalent to a BA elsewhere (except Oxford and Cambridge, where the MA is not awarded for postgraduate study). You would need to take the MLitt degree in English after completing your undergraduate studies in order to qualify for the teaching positions you are seeking.</p>
<p>^Yes, the MLitt degree is the one I saw when I saw people from St. Andrews teaching English - I just assumed that was the one you were in.</p>