I’m a teacher, and as I am fond of saying, the only thing I love better than gong to work in the morning is going home in the afternoon.
It’s really difficult to compare teaching to a “normal” job: not least because it isn’t clear what a “normal” job is like: I’m working with a vague picture of some office type environment where people do things with computers for 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year.
Teaching definitely has advantages: there is a lot of time off, and (in some districts at least) you get good benefits (though this varies: I’m in a large urban school district, and our health benefits suck: my husband has better benefits as a grad student!). Not least among the advantages is that you are doing something that truly needs doing. There’s also something to be said for a job where every year you get to start afresh.
However, there are real and profound challenges found in teaching that do not (typically) exist in the corporate world (though that can be said for many jobs). First and foremost, it is hard to overstate just how grueling it is to be on for six to seven hours a day (not counting planning). Teaching is brutal. It’s physically brutal, because you never sit down, and, more importantly, it is psychologically brutal. You’re in this room full of children and you have to be The Adult for every moment, the focus of attention every instant. Trying to keep 30 all-very-different people on task and learning and interested and be attuned to their needs and tensions and make sure you weigh every word and gesture for anything that might be seen as inappropriate or counterproductive is simply exhausting.
Add to this the difficulty in completing the business of normal living–doctors appointments, DMV visits, house inspections, cable installation–because in order to come into work an hour late or leave an hour early you have to take a personal day (or half day, if your district allows), arrange a sub (if you can get one), make sub plans, and deal with the aftermath of those sub plans, and you have to live with the cruel little fact of a 25 minute lunch that you can never, ever start a minute early or stop a minute late.
As far as planning time goes, the various duties and the mounds of paperwork required just to keep the school running eat up virtually all of that: waiting in line for the one god damn copy machine for 135 teachers eats up the rest. The grading, recording, and planning for the four different subjects I teach have to be done before and after school.
There are some teachers who manage to construct things so that their lives are easy: they are shitty teachers who use the same overheads and worksheets year after year, handing them out and taking them up like clockwork. Their kids don’t learn anything, but the teachers don’t care. I dare say you have people like this in the corporate world, who manage to do just enough to make it more trouble than it is worth to fire them, or who manage to do one vital little thing that provides job security. Hell, the boards are full of people who post all day from work because where they work, they CAN. That doesn’t mean that all corporate jobs are easy, or all corporate people don’t really have to do anything.
In the end, you can list all the benefits and all the challenges of teaching, and whose to say if summers off are canceled out by 25 minute lunches? There’s no way to do it. It seems to me that the only thing that has meaning at all is that we do have a teacher shortage, and it seems to me that if teachers were radically over paid, if the job were really disproportionately cushy, there’d be a LOT more competition to be a teacher. It’s hardly a secret job. The fact that there is a critical need for teachers, and the fact that there is a high attrition rate among teachers suggests that it is not particularly MORE desirable than the working world. On the other hand, the fact that there are many teachers out there suggests that it isn’t hell on earth, either.