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More popular than George Clooney. More in demand than Kelly Clarkson. These hard-to-fill specialties are the wave of the future.

By Mary Ellen Flannery and John Rosales

Just bask in the glow for a minute. You—the reading teacher, the security guard, the physics geek—you’re hot! With a growing shortage of teachers and other professionals on the horizon nationally, you should enjoy that sought-after status. As always, special education teachers, as well as math and science specialists, are among the most in demand, but so are a lot of other folks. So, who’s the big man on campus now? It just might be you.

On the Road to Peace

Forty students have signed up for Karima Belemlih’s Introduction to Arabic class next year—nearly twice as many as she can accept. But that’s just the kind of interest that the U.S. Department of Defense wants to see. In their eyes, Belemlih is doing a heckuva job.

Less than 2 percent of American students study Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Korean, Japanese, Russian, or Chinese, all critical languages in the new world economy and political landscape. A new National Security Language Initiative, unveiled in January, aims to boost those numbers dramatically by pumping millions of dollars into teacher education and other training programs.

In the meantime, it’s not easy to find an Arabic teacher. Belemlih, originally from Morocco, was hired at Suffield High School in Connecticut to teach French. Her administrators were thrilled to get a second language (without paying for a second teacher). And she was delighted to get a chance to teach her language and culture.

With its non-Western alphabet and way of writing, it’s not easy. (Did you know Arabic sentences don’t always need verbs?) But Belemlih knows her students appreciate the challenge, and likewise, she relishes the opportunity to show them a world beyond the nightly news. “When they see me, they don’t see a stereotypical Arab person,” she says.

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