Question:
I will be graduating from college in May and have never had to write a
resume before. Me degree will be in education. I am hoping some one can
send me a sample of what a teacher's resume should look like? Also, any
tips or sample questions that might come up in an interview so I won't be
shocked.
Answer:
-For sample resumes visit your local book store. There you will find
books filled with hundreds of samples. I wrote one resume then went to
the professionals to see what they would prepare. They must have read
the same book.
-I'm not sure about the special virtue thing. When presenting a list - as a
work history is - it is preferable (and thus virtuous I suppose) to
maintain consistency.
If an entry begins with a pronoun or a gerund, for example, it seems to make
sense to maintain that form if possible. In newspapers, for example, the
rule is to maintain consistency when preparing bulleted items in a news
story.
What seems odd in the way resumes commonly are written is that people often
present the first "current" entry with gerunds - which, without a subject or
predicate, are non-finite, in that they contain no information about the
tense (though I guess the implied subject and verb create the sense of
present progressive) Then, for the other entries, the writer switches to
past tense verbs.
Thus - to use an extreme example:
1998-Present English Teacher Teaching the kiddies English
1996-1998 English Teacher Taught the kiddies English
or the alternative (Your present simple?)
1998-Present English Teacher Teach the kiddies English
1996-1998 English Teacher Taught the kiddies English
It seems to me that all of this is avoidable simply by using non-tense
specific gerunds. The added benefit is that everything simply sounds more
active, and the writer is not underscoring the "oldness" of the
responsibilities:
1998-Present English Teacher Teaching the kiddies English
1996-1998 English Teacher Teaching the kiddies English
This is the way I was taught to do a resume decades ago - I guess it was in
a book somewhere, but I simply can find no reference to it.
