A teacher shows twelfth-grade students how to construct a small animal house.
Credit: Allison Shelley for American Education
Ina Gutierrez lives for the opera. She has a master’s degree in classical voice as well as a decade of singing and performance under her belt.
She tapped into that lifelong passion to teach music and choir to fourth and fifth graders for two years in Kern County using emergency credentials, and she loved every minute of it but had to stop teaching once that credential ran out.
She now often works as an adjunct professor at CSU Bakersfield, where she teaches “Music in the Classroom,” a class that shows teachers how to share music with children. Gutierrez feels frustrated that she is qualified to show teachers how to teach but can’t teach actual students. She attempted to get a Career Technical Education credential for music but was told she couldn’t use it for elementary school…
