Mike Levy was a law enforcement officer for a total of 30 years. He went from serving as a military police specialist with the U.S. Air Force for four years, to being a Deputy Sheriff’s in Wicomico County for 14 months, to his last cop job in Ocean City, Maryland.

He has now been teaching at Worcester Technical High School for 11-years in Newark, Maryland.

Using experiences to shape his students in different career fields has really come in handy. Students get to go out into the real world, well educated and more aware in the criminal justice, and emergency management field with knowledge most students wouldn’t get.

Levy has been changing lives for a long time. Some might even say it is a calling. Levy’s career choices have always had an impact on people’s lives, however, these two completely different careers had the most drastic impact on people’s lives.

He went from policing to teaching, from saving those who needed saving and teaching those who needed teaching.

“I always liked teaching as a cop, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to teach what I thought was the correct and relevant things in justice,” he said. “Teaching and police work are sometimes very similar.”

One way teaching and police work are similar, he said, is “when you’re a teacher it seems like everyone criticizes what you do and everyone can do it better than you, the same in police work. The similarity is that no one wants to do the job.”

Out of all the jobs he has done, including police work and teaching, there has always been so much to learn.

Levy went through things such as war, to things such as natural disasters like hurricanes in the real world. He explains natural disasters won’t care if there are schools, but during war people don’t attack schools and hospitals, but all these things are part of emergency management.

Though there is not much Levy misses about the old career field, the long hours, dangerous jobs, hard schedule, he does miss directly helping people. Saving someone from awful things, and getting to really rescue something was fun he explains. These were happy moment for him.

But there are some things to miss, Levy explains, while watching his students discover things about themselves  they themselves are his favorite part of teaching.

Some students walk into his class with no idea what they are doing, and leave knowing what they want to happen next.

“I am very glad I chose teaching. It keeps me close enough the career field, but yet still far enough,” he explains.

Levy uses his past experiences in every aspect of his life. The experiences help convey real world situations to his criminal justice classes, to give them real world cases.

Staying in contact with some of his work  buddies helps his students as well as himself. His students can find great spots to intern, and it helps the people giving interns fill necessary spots with people suiting for the job.

“I’m teaching career and technology education,” he said, and everything learned in his old career fields is relevant to his criminal justice class.

Teaching has had some great outcomes, as Levy explains.

“Out of all my careers, teaching is my favorite. It is very rewarding to see the students, in the career fields that I though them about.”

However, with that worrying is a big deal, Levy explains, “once my students are not in my class, I worry about them and hope they take what they learned into accountability.”