Yeah, some districts have a morale problem.
http://paulharrisonline.blogspot.com/2014/03/teacher-quits-over-excessive-testing.html
http://paulharrisonline.blogspot.com/2014/04/great-teacher-bad-tests.html
My daughter is in her 6th year of teaching, and she’s looking for a job in another field. I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was when the Board of Education declared that no student would ever be given a grade less than 50. That on top of all the other crap she’s had to deal with, including rude, disruptive kids, parents who don’t give a damn or who can’t believe their special snowflake is anything but angelic, being out of pocket for supplies, the number of hours she has to put in at home… It’s really unfortunate, because she’s a good teacher. I’ve helped her out in her classroom on many occasions and she is very creative and enthusiastic when she can get the kids to behave.
This year, she switched from 5th to 7th grade, and I’m sure that’s part of the issue. She was hoping that having older kids would mean she could teach more in depth (she teaches science) but she said her students now (in Florida) are about on a par with the 5th graders she taught in Virginia. She’s been working on her resume and thinking about what she’d rather do. I suspect if politicians would let educators manage education, she might consider sticking with it. Maybe…
Amen. You can’t learn how to educate. It’s an amalgam of natural gift and learning from experience. Who better to explain what they need? Which from my perspective was mostly to leave me alone and let me teach. 
All three of my main life’s jobs have been working for the government and this was my major complaint in all three. The people dictating to the workers have no clue. And when you adjust to all the new guidelines they change them again depending on which way the political wind is blowing.
Four years in the classroom.
I loved the act of teaching. It’s exhausting, exhilarating, challenging and eye opening.
I didn’t like being a teacher. I disliked the way the years rolled past, one after another, all different but all kind of the same. It always felt so depressing to start another year-- which would be just one of a pretty set number, up till I retire. And all that on a pretty set pay schedule. It all felt depressingly low on outlets for ambition.
If the pay were better and I’d have had freedom to develop my own curriculum, I might have stuck with it. It wasn’t a bad gig, but it was a lot of work for something that was a bit of a dead end job.
I went back to my old high school to work as an interpreter about 12 years, and the ones who had been there a long time said that in recent years, there had been a change in parents’ attitudes. Parents no longer seemed to assume that teachers wanted what was best for the kids, and seemed often to be on the defensive from the first day; parents blamed teachers for everything that went wrong: if a kid was getting bad grades because he never even went to class, that still must somehow be the teacher’s fault, because the class wasn’t interesting, or the teacher was making thew child feel unwelcome, or something; it couldn’t possibly be a discipline problem the parent needed to address.
This was around 1998. I can tell you that in the mid-1980s if I were caught skipping class (something I did exactly once), I would have been grounded for a first offense, unless I was sick, or something, and grounded meant I couldn’t go anywhere but school or synagogue, and couldn’t do anything at home but homework, chores, or read Torah and other religious books. I got grounded exactly once, and because I skipped gym, I also had to do exercises in the morning. Believe me, I never got grounded again. This was my aunt and uncle, who were a little old-fashioned, but I think most parents were something like this.
If the trend has continued, parents and teachers are sort of adversarial. My son is only in the first grade, and likes school, so I haven’t seen it yet, but I know teachers seem surprised when I say I will address something at home that happened at school.
I had clubs I participated in.
Exactly! And meant HS moreso. BTW, I mentioned up-thread, and in another, that I’m a hopefully future, not current teacher.
I guess you should ask my wife why she was willing to give winter clothes out of own closet to students who were too poor to be able to dress properly.
Answer: Because some people don’t like to see children go without necessities. And - surprise - many of those people gravitate into teaching.
I’m a after school teacher, so I get 1/3 of the stress of the teacher but with the teaching experience and experience dealing with the parents. I love the children and I want them to learn. However, Friday is my last day since there are parents that make me want me to punch them. I have had parent ( known to be unstable) yell at me and tell me I’m a horrible person. I see kids that can curse like the sailor and yet they cannot write the alphabet. There is one parent who expects me to raise her child since "I’m the teacher”. I see parents that can afford fancy shoes and clothes and their kids do not have the proper school supplies. There kids are not the problem but the parents are.
Don’t get me started on the administrators.
Might I ask where this is? Around here in the midwest they can get dozens of applicants for every teaching job including those harder to fill areas.
Some have said the best 3 things about teaching are June, July, and August.
I think it all comes down to your situation. If you teach in a good school its great. Heck many teachers would take a big cut in pay just to teach in those situations.
I am in Texas. But here is a list of shortagesby state and subject. And dozens of applicants doesn’t mean you have a viable candidate. Teaching hiring is done annually, not continuously, and people shotgun-apply. So you might get 12 resumes, but 6 of them are just non-starters: not certified, incoherently written, big red flags. The other 6 are the same other 6 everyone likes the look of, and so everyone calls them.
In terms of the original question: on one hand, teaching is really, really hard. I am pretty sensitive to anyone looking at my job from the outside and saying “that doesn’t look so bad to me”. For whatever it’s worth, I’d never say that about anyone else’s job, either–there’s just no way to have a perspective on these things from the outside. On the other hand, righteous indignation is basically a competitive sport among teachers, and teachers do often have a bizarre idea that it’s literally the worst job in the world, which it is not.
All jobs have good points and bad points, and in a few crucial ways both the positives and the negatives for teaching are somewhat different. For some people, that makes teaching a terrible choice because the bad points are things they really dislike and/or the good points are things that don’t much matter to them. For others, the bad points are preferable to the sorts of downsides you get in a private-sector job, and/or the advantages are overwhelming. It’s a personality thing.
So if the question is “Is teaching really that hard?”, my answer is an unequivocal yes, at least when it’s done right. But if the question is “Is teaching bad?”, I’d say that’s highly dependent on where you are, but even more dependent on who you are.
Excellent points there.
If I might add, many people go into teaching because they they have the right intentions, meaning to help needy kids and/or help the world, but seriously lack the skills it takes to become a good teacher. However they think things like good attitude and perseverance will overcome that. I admire them because their heart is in the right place but they are into something way over their heads.
Quick story: I know of one school here where the staff, in order to get rid of a bad principal, actually got the students to intentionally do crappy on the state exams just to make him look bad and get him removed. It worked! He was gone the next year.
Good question. I don’t know if she’s really off this week for spring break, but she has told me in the past that she has arranged her schedule such that she gets all her grading done at school.
Interesting responses so far. I’m surprised that hardly anyone has mentioned the summer vacations. That was at the forefront of my mind when I started the thread, but it seems to hardly figure into people’s estimation of the profession. Is the reality of having all that time off just not that big a deal when you actually have it? Or are the difficulties some people have outlined so bad that it’s still not worth it?
I imagine that it loses its novelty after awhile, just like anything.
I also imagine if you start the school year already looking forward to the next summer break, your heart really isn’t in the job.
I get my grading mostly done at school, but the way I do that is to be at school 65 hours a week.
Summers are very, very nice. Even if you work quite a bit (and I always have), it’s this amazing relaxation. One of the most stressful things about teaching is how structured it is. Most professional jobs give you some sort of control over how you spend your time. When you teach, you can’t even pee on your own schedule. You can’t leave 15 minutes early to get your hair cut, or come in an hour late because you needed to get your car inspected. If you get sick, you can’t allow the doctor to “squeeze you in” that day–you have to suffer until the next, because you need the lag time to set up a sub and sub plans. You have to take a half day if you are going to miss any work at all, and there’s no flex–you can’t make up 15 minutes late by working 15 minutes later.
It would be really hard to do that 255 days a year. It’s hard enough to do it 187 days a year. Is summer an important consideration? Absolutely. It might even be essential. But it’s just one piece of the puzzle. This comes back to my earlier comments about the trade-offs being different than in the private sector. My personality is such that I really like working 65-70 hour weeks (and those are real hours–I track, because I am that kind of person) for most of the year, and then having big blocks of time where I am either not working at all, or am working in a much less urgent fashion (I probably average 20 hours a week during summer and Christmas). Other people hate that kind of pacing and prefer a steady 45-55 hour week all year long. It’s just a matter of temperament.
One thing I always feel obligated to point out is that summers are unpaid. Your salary may be spread out over 12 months, but that’s just making a loan to the school. This is not an academic distinction. If you get cancer or have a baby or your mom has a stroke and you have to miss a bunch of a school, each day they deduct 1/187 of your annual salary from your check, not 1/255, like most jobs. This has significant implications: if you miss a month of work, you lose 5 weeks or so of pay. If you miss 3 months of work, you are back at work a long time before you start getting paid again.
I prefer my current situation, working for a mom and pop tutoring center, where said bosses are perfectly reasonable people whom I can talk to heart to heart and I know that they will listen to my concerns (even if they don’t agree with me in the end). They give me a lot of slack too to do my own thing-the male boss even said he appreciates me for how I think outside the box. They usually nail the new hires; we’ve had exactly two jerks working there in my 14 years, and they didn’t last very long.
It has been said that the best 3 things about teaching are June, July, and August. I know teachers who use that time to go on month long trips like hiking the Appalachian Trail.
Now that being said most teachers would wish they could be more flexible with vacation time.
I see that changing and it may just be a different district. My sons teachers take time off quite often. In fact its frustrating that he has a sub, AGAIN, because the teachers kid was sick or teachers kid had a Dr.s appointment. He had one teacher who had an hour off every day because she was breastfeeding and she needed to go pump. He had another who took 2 weeks off to get married and go on her honeymoon.
Now I dont blame them for wanting time off but kids just dont learn much with subs.
Also while I hear you talking about 60-70 hour weeks, at my sons elementary school the teachers get a planning period plus time away from kids when the kids have specials (ex. music, art, PE, computers) and they do not have to monitor recess so they get that time free also. Plus every quarter has a teacher work day where they go without the kids.
And a lot of teachers work during the summers. I know elementary school teachers that offer summer care. High school teachers that coach. Teachers who paint and roof homes. And, of course, teach summer school. Teachers pay isn’t great because we figure they only work nine months (they really work ten - they have a few days before and after the school year that they NEED to be there, and most teachers I know spend a few days before and after that as well organizing and planning), so a lot of them use their summers to supplement their income.
And for a lot of teachers, there is continuing education that needs to get done in the summer. When I was a project manager, my boss gave me some time to get in my required training (for project managers they are Professional Development Units). Teachers may not get that time during the school year.