Frostburg State Holds MAT Informational Workshop

On Wednesday November 4, 2009 Frostburg State University Coordinator Vicki Mazer held an informational workshop for aspiring MAT applicants. The MAT program is a graduate program at Frostburg State that graduates students with a Masters of Arts in Teaching degree in 12 short months. Mazer summed up the program by declaring, “We teach you how to teach.”
Mazer also says, “We take as many applicants as we can, but there are some restrictions. It’s much easier to get into the program if you already have or are planning on having a degree in a specific content area.” When Mazer talks about the content area degrees she is referring to a Bachelors degree in a field such as Math, English, Biology, etc. The program is set up to quickly acclimate students who have a vast knowledge of their content area to the world of teaching.
The program starts in the summer immediately following the commencement of the university in June and runs until the following May. In the summer, Students on the secondary (middle and high school) side of the program take 15 credit hours of coursework. Then in the Fall the coursework is cut down to 12 credit hours, but students begin their placement in the local schools. Students can expect to be in public schools for approximately 100 days Fall through Spring. However, the coursework does not stop. There are 3 more credit hours of coursework in the winter and 12 more in the spring. As Mazer says, “This is a very intense program. You go to school a full school day, and then you are expected to come home and go to class until eight or nine o’clock at night sometimes. Most Students have no time to keep a job, except for occasional part-time jobs on the weekend.”
However the program is not as bad as it seems. For those intent on becoming teachers, it only takes 12 months to become fully certified and accredited by the NACATE. Not to mention there is Financial Aid available. Students can earn the Teach Scholarship, worth up to $8,000, if they agree to take a teaching position in a high need low income school in the State of Maryland. Federal Subsidized and Unsubsidized Loans are also available to help with the costs of the program which totals around $15,000 - $16,000. The cost of each credit hour is $399 at Frostburg State, and $327 at Hagerstown Community College.
As Mazer, piled all this information on the plate of 13 students sitting in attendance in Pullen Hall room 107, not a word was spoken. Not until the end of the presentation at least, at which time a few hands shot up. All of them had questions about the application process or the interview scheduling and those questions were handled relatively quickly and the entire workshop lasted about 45 minutes, but 45 minutes was all it took to put a couple bewildered looks on students’ faces and send then scrambling to the registrar’s office for applications. Mazer concluded her workshop by announcing that the MAT committee will be holding a Portfolio/Interview Training session on Thursday November 12 at 5PM, which put a small sign of relief back into most of the faces in the room.