Do you like meetings? Do you like paperwork? Do you like being told how to do your job by bosses who have never done your job? Do you want to (depending on your area) be severely under compensated while spending a not insignificant portion of it on the supplies you need to do your job? Do you want to be given more and more duties every year for no increase in pay? Do you want to have thirty bosses who are either completely absent from their duties or hovering over yours, looking for a way to sue you based on federal laws and jeopardize your career? Do you want your value as an employee to be based almost entirely on the performance of children taking standardized tests???
Become a teacher today!
I love teaching. It's infuriating and awful at times, heartbreaking almost daily, and occasionally rewarding on a personal level. I love teaching and working with kids but the job is that wrapped in layers and layers of bull shit. For every hour I teach (around six each day) I can expect around half that in grading. But not in easy to plan around consistent hours, sometimes it's none and sometimes it's twelve. For every hour I teach, I can expect to do ten minutes of lesson planning (hour a day). Not because it's important or for it to be used, but so that admin knows I'm doing it and has a record of curriculum for the district to critique me on without seeing me teach. For every hour I teach, I can expect to be in ten minutes of meetings with admin pushing some new bull shit at me, the same thing I've been doing but with a new name or added paperwork. For every hour I teach, I have five minutes of meeting with parents who are always too removed or can't cut the cord, but rarely just right. And for every hour I teach, I'll spend twenty minutes analyzing data and test results to see if my kids are really not understanding something or if it's a test taking trick.
And for fifty five minutes of sixty for every hour I teach, most of my kids hate being there. you have to love teaching beyond everything else in your life . There is nothing but teaching . You need to want to be dragged through a mile of glass in order to help the child to really think that teaching is worth it.
If you expect your teaching career to be like the movies, to struggle through a montage of horrible and awful parents and administration and kids just don't want to be reached and then eventually find the goal and teach your kids and reach them and touch their hearts and tell them the greatest of things and have them stand on their desks and say oh Captain my Captain... you are in for a rude awakening .
Teaching is 99% the horrible montage. Every year I think about changing careers so I can afford to have kids, so I can leave work at work, so I can not get any more grey hairs at 25. But I can't because I love teaching.
And this is coming from a guy who just won teacher of the year. Be sure you want it before you become a teacher.