Free Sample
The Complete Guide to Becoming An Environmental Science Teacher, Postsecondary
What you'll really do, earn, and need to know before you commit to teaching environmental science at the college level—including the honest numbers on pay, job openings, and the daily grind.
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: What Does a Environmental Science Teacher, Postsecondary Actually Do?
Let's strip away the job title and get to what you'd actually be doing on a Tuesday morning in late October. Not the "shape young minds" marketing version—the real version, including the parts that involve sitting in a windowless office with a stack of lab reports that have to be graded by Friday.
A postsecondary environmental science teacher—often called a professor, instructor, or faculty member—works at a community college, a four-year college, or a university. Your title depends on the institution. At a community college, you might be called a "faculty member" or "instructor." At a university, you'll likely be on a tenure track with titles like "assistant professor," "associate professor," and "professor." The job description differs more than you'd think between these places, so let's look at what's universal first, then what changes.
Core responsibility number one: teaching. That sounds obvious, but the specifics matter. A typical teaching load is between three and five courses per semester, depending on your institution. A "semester" runs about 15 weeks, and each course usually meets two or three times a week for an hour to three hours per session. If you teach five courses that each meet three hours a week, that's fifteen hours of classroom time per week. That's the part that shows on a transcript. What doesn't show is the preparation.
For every hour you spend standing in front of a class, you'll spend at least one to two