Have you talked with your wife about why the teacher at the charter school gave her a negative review and why an education professor said she was not cut out to be a teacher? The review must have included reasons. Do those reasons make sense to you?
We talked with one of the two teachers she is working with this year (she came over to visit for a movie) , and initially she was worried because of what she had heard before, but she sees her as harder working and more helpful then any other assistant she has had. My wife is teaching one of the math groups this year, and she goes above and beyond on her responsibilities.
As for the professors at the university that 'didn't like' her, she went to a very small college, and there were some professors that she tried to go to their office hours, but they always cancelled them. There were some classes where she knew a way to solve some of the problems from talking with her uncle or the way she learned in highschool, and she had to solve them exactly the way the professor taught, or else they'd be marked wrong.
Her adviser was one of the people who 'didn't like her' and her GPA was just below what was needed for being able to student teach and get her teaching certificate. Her adviser didn't even tell her that she could have taken other classes to pull her average up and still qualify. When she graduated and had special mention for her involvement in one of the sports at the school, she said 'At least you were good at something' when she shook her hand after she got her diploma.
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Here's something else that's ridiculous. She's called up the PA Dept of Ed, and they say they cannot tell her if her classes she took with UoP would count toward Act 48 hours, they 'won't know till she puts in an application'. She doesn't want to get stuck not having enough act 48 hours by the time she needs them, and as an assistant she doesn't get many opportunities.
I tried to suggest that she try to go to some of the classes here and there that count for act 48 hours, but she's saying 'If I'm going to pay for them, they may as well do something for me'. She wants to go take a Reading Specialist cert program. I can't help but feel this is similar to what I've seen in other threads, the 'I have to buy a new car b/c I can't fit 3 carseats in the back', followed by 'you know you can fit three, you just have to buy the right kind'.
Any one have any recommendations to try to actually get an answer from PDE to actually get the answer if her other UoP credits would count (they're all 500 level courses, but she got her teaching certificate by taking those classes).
Also, how much more would she be likely to get paid with vs without having a reading specialist certification? What's the RoI? She has her ESL cert, and she says that combined with the reading specalist cert would 'make her look better'.
I tried to bring up that other things would/should 'make her look better', like networking, getting to know the right people and getting your name in, but we are in an area where there is one large university and one med university nearby, and there is a very heavy weighting of people who student teach here actually getting teaching positions, and because she didn't go though one of those schools, she was unable to student teach here and lived with a family friend in a smaller district to actually get her student teaching in.