The United States Bureau of Labor projects that by 2026, there will have been about 100,000 teachers leaving the profession each year. While teachers are leaving the profession in droves, one teacher at Linganore chose to enter the field of education for her second career.
Randi Kirkland is an English teacher at Linganore High School (LHS). She has taught at Linganore for the last five of her 11 years in teaching.Prior to teaching, Kirkland served in the U.S. Air Force; she enlisted directly after graduating high school.
In order to get job placement in the military, enlistees are required to take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), which is a test that shows the strengths of people who take it. When she took the ASVAB after high school, she was placed in the STEM field based on the results that the test showed about her.
For six months after basic training, she learned about and observed weather systems to prepare for her new job as a meteorologist.
After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Kirkland got deployed to Diego Garcia, a remote island in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Once there, she was the meteorologist responsible for reporting weather conditions to pilots who had to fly into danger zones.
“Anytime you’re dealing with weather; it’s humbling,” said Kirkland. “There’s so many variables that you can’t control,”
After being in the STEM field for a few years, Kirkland made the decision to leave the military at age 26 because of feeling unfulfilled in her job.
“You could do everything that you wanted and put a forecast together and then be wrong,” Kirkland said. “It felt like one of us [my husband or I] needed to be stable and not deployable.”
With Kirkland’s husband also in the military, having one parent in the household with a non-travelling job to raise their two children was another large motivating factor to leave the military.
During her military career, Kirkland and her husband were stationed in Japan. Since she had taught in Japan when she and her husband were stationed there, it was natural for her to stay in the education field when she moved back to the United States.
“I was born to be a teacher or an educator,” Kirkland said. “It keeps me in my job when I see students that really want to learn and have that desire and curiosity.”
Her students feel the same way. Many reported that Kirkland genuinely cares about them as a student and does whatever she can to add to their educational experience.
Adrianna Molina is a junior at LHS and she recalled enjoying Mrs. Kirkland’s class as a freshman.
“My experience with Mrs. Kirkland’s class was a very fun one…you’re able to be yourself,” Molina said. “I was able to do projects I love. She was very happy and excited [to see] me working on it, and was almost as invested [in the projects] as I was.”
Kirkland believes that the military and education fields are not all that different. In the military, her skills of briefing pilots on important information and being able to synthesize data quickly benefited her role as a meteorologist. Now that she teaches at Linganore, she thinks that the briefing skills she used in the Air Force are applicable to her current profession.
“I’m constantly thinking about my students and how they’re perceiving things, so I think that my briefing skills translated really well to my job [as a teacher],” said Kirkland. “I take education so seriously. I believe in the power of education and the opportunity that it provides. So, I see a similarity in the service aspect,”
Coming from a broken home as a child, Kirkland chose to join the military because she wanted to better herself and provide a stable future for herself. Since military enlistment directly out of high school is on the rise, she wants to become a mentor at LHS for students that are in the same position or are interested in joining the military.
She also noted that not going to college does not mean you cannot go through higher education later on. In fact, one benefit of military service is that they can pay for you to go to college once you are enlisted. Kirkland herself has three college degrees that the military paid for in full because she was already in the service.
Kirkland spoke on the importance of people with experience helping to shepherd in the next generation of leaders and members of the workforce.
“Personal experience can go a long way, you know, in kind of being an informant for people,” said Kirkland. “I would love to be a resource in our school.”
Kirkland believes that teachers have a massive impact on their students, and how they teach can change a whole community. She reported that she herself strives to teach students to take pride in their work and to represent themselves well, just as she tries to do in her own life.
“When people say thank you for your service as a veteran, I think I do more for my country as a teacher hands down. I have never served my country more than I do as a teacher,” Kirkland said.
