Teri Arenstam
Tearcher Certification Program

arenstamIt was summer of 2001 when Teri Arenstam of Saco, Maine decided she no longer wanted to work for the data-processing, Internet-banking company that she and her husband had founded a decade before.

“It wasn’t fulfilling,” she explains. “I didn’t like the work. I looked at my husband one day in late August and said, ‘You know, I’d really like to go back to school and get my teaching certificate.’” Two days later she enrolled in the University of New England’s Teacher Certification Program.

In the 1970s, following her graduation from Bates College with a degree in biology, Arenstam went to work for a bank. A few years later, when she started a family, she put her career on hold for a few years. But about the time her children started school, she and her husband founded their data-processing, Internet-banking business, which allowed her the flexibility to be at home with her children when she needed to be.

“I really, really like the people we worked with but I never liked the job,” she recounts. “All the time the kids were young, I spent a lot of time volunteering in their classrooms. Somewhere along the line I just thought I was interested in teaching.”

Flexibility
Arenstam chose UNE’s Teacher Certification Program because of its flexibility and because her husband had taught courses in computer science at UNE as a part-time adjunct faculty member in the past. “He really liked the school,” she says. “He thought it was a nice place to work.”

But flexibility was the most important factor. Arenstam wanted to be able to take courses toward certification and work at the same time. “UNE offered me that flexibility,” she explains. “It was great with nearly all the classes in the afternoons and evenings.”

When she started taking her first class in fall 2001, she admits she was “tentative. I’d been out of college for over 20 years, and I thought, ‘you know am I nuts? I’ve got a good job, I make good money, I can work when I want.’ Yet with every class I took, it convinced me this was the right decision.”

She took one course to begin, then two in the spring, and three in the summer, and by fall 2002, she had landed a job at her alma mater, Thornton Academy, the private high school in Saco where she started the year teaching one science class and supervising the computer lab.

Halfway through that first year, when a science teacher left the Academy, she took over teaching four more science classes, becoming a full-time substitute teacher. In spring 2003 she was hired as a full-time science teacher for the 2003-04 year.

She has continued taking classes in the TCP program while teaching at Thornton, and this coming summer she plans to finish the one remaining science course she needs for State of Maine certification.

“I’ve been really pleased with the quality of the instruction and quality of the classes,” Arenstam says. “The professors that I had really had a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge to impart, and they did it in a wonderful way.”

Importance of Education Classes
“The other thing,” she adds, “it surprised me how important the education classes were - how I use them every day in my teaching: exceptionality, assessment, technology in the classroom, designs for affective learning. They were just great. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t use something from some of those classes that I took.”

She says before she began teaching, she believed that academic content was the important thing:“ Content is important, but just as important are the tools to get the content across. Once I started teaching I was just so thankful that I had taken those courses and that I had that information to fall back on.”

Looking back and toward the future, Arenstam says, “I’ve found my niche, I’m very happy here at Thornton. The kids are great. I took a cut in pay to become a teacher, and I work more hours, but it was absolutely the best thing I ever did. I have never worked harder, but I’ve never had a job that I’ve liked more.”

(Last updated 2/04)
    
Apply Online
Request Information
     

Back to Top

 
» Advanced Search