101 – FCS Professional Interview

Interviewer: Sandy Osburn – May 26, 2020

(1-2) FCS Professional interviewed: Cheryl Lee – FCS Teacher at Rigby High School
(3) Education: Bachelor’s Degree in Home Economics
(4)FCS as chosen profession: The only area that looked interesting and had value
alignment.
(5)FCS Mission fulfillment: Gives students the tools they need to be successful in life.

Cheryl Lee currently is one of three Family and Consumer Science Teachers at the
Rigby High School in Idaho. (1) Her typical day consists of the following hourly
breakdown.
Period 1 – planning, preparing curriculum & assignments, shopping, etc.
Period 2 – Teach child development class
Period 3 – Teach a child development class
Period 4 – Teach a food science class
Duty Free lunch
Period 5 – Teach a food science class
Period 6 – Teach a food science class
She also has hall monitoring duty and bus duty for the school.
(2) Her biggest challenges don’t have much to do with the field of study itself, rather with
the necessity of managing a classroom and disciplining the difficult students who feels
inclined to cause problems for the entire class. Due to the position of FCS being an
elective rather than a required course, there is a lot of pressure to make the class look
inviting and memorable for the student and by word of mouth, for future students.
Marketing the class is always in the back of her mind in both creating the assignments
and working with the students. There is also the challenge of updating and preparing
the curriculum. It would require a great deal of time, and there is no time available
during the school year, with the knowledge that the compensation is not adequate for
what it would take to give it the proper overhaul.
(3) On the other hand, being able to work with the youth so closely in the FCCLA (formly
FHA) and watching them develop into such amazing leaders, as well as providing the
other kids in under her tutelage some powerful tools for their future life, is very fulfilling
and satisfying. With a roster of 75 – 130 students a day, she is primed to be a force for
good in the lives of these youth.
(4) On average, she has to make thousands of decisions each day, or as she coined it –
constant. Deciding what assignments will work for each of the students and taking
IEP’s, 504’s, backgrounds, interests, talents, and capacities into consideration. Also
taking into account diet restrictions, mental health challenges, the affect of weather and
current events also play a role. That’s not to mention the tiny little decisions of how to
assess the students progress, how much weight to put on each activity/assignment, and
how to best administer the task to keep the interest of all the students. She would like to
have a personal relationship with each student, but sometimes the best she can do is
try to remember their names and assess their needs as it pertains to her class.
(5) With all these items to take into consideration, she strives to find a balance to
address all the students – using a few lectures, a few assignments that require
research, a few projects, a few labs, and other types of assignments. She tends to keep
the projects small with a short deadline because she has found having bigger projects
or semester long projects was difficult to monitor their progress and what she needs to
be teaching them.
(6) Cheryl never wanted to become a teacher. In fact, she considers herself to be a very
quiet and reserved individual and so the idea of standing in front of a classroom of
rowdy kids did not seem enticing at all. However, as she considered what her interests
were and what would be the most valuable for her future family – she kept coming back
to studying FCS. She was very fortunate to have received a science endorsement for
food science before the legislation changed because she was grandfathered in and has
the opportunity of teaching science. It would be very difficult for an FCS professional to
get that endorsement now.
(7) Cheryl finds the professional associations, trade journals, and magazines very
important, though she struggles to find time to simply sit down to read the content. She
really appreciates the information being so valuable and available and when she has to
research something, she can always find the answers she is looking for. Another point
of value is the funding. Since FCS is an elective and at the mercy of funding, the
associations are lobbying for her interests to secure both the funding and the legislation.
(8) She considers her undergraduate major in Home Economics as essential. It gave
her the competency with the content as well as the confidence to overcome her more
reserved nature. (9) Although a person can get their teacher certificate to teach FCS
classes through an alternative method than the traditional studies, they have to have a
certain amount of expertise in the field that they are going to be teaching. That
proficiency could only be attained through on the job training.
(10) Even with her traditional training, she found it difficult to be hired. Wherever she
applied, it seemed there was a 10 to 1 ratio of candidates being interviewed and she
frequently came up as second runner. (11) When she did finally get hired, she received
a compensation of about 18,000 a year. That was back in 1988. Although she is
compensated more now, there is still the struggle to earn enough as a single mom with
no child support. (12) When asked what advice she would give to someone considering
this type of job, she said to go for the master’s degree or at least look at a different
career in order to have a higher income.