Why do people thinking teaching is any harder than any other job that requires a university education? You get trained; you get mentored; you get regular professional improvement. And, the bit about low wages always makes me chuckle. Everyone overlooks the lifetime earnings of a public school teacher: It is usually very good (much better than most boring office jobs), when you include the value of all benefits, including summer holiday and retire/pension.
It's not harder than any other job, but it's harder than many. Teaching, especially in middle and high school, is not as technically difficult as say many developer roles, but it is far more difficult when it comes to organization, emotional resilience, multitasking, and managing people.
It requires you to not only keep 20+ twelve year olds from devolving into chaos, but to also teach them things many of them could care less about. Then, you need take into account the laws surrounding your choices both in and outside the school and your representation in front of administration and parents. In the age of cell phones any slip up will likely end up being online and possibly in the news.
Imagine, as a developer, if you every possible small mistake you made had the potential to find its way to Twitter or Reddit? What if you had to manage 20 different, but similar projects? You had to time your bathroom breaks because you can't go whenever you want. That your lunches were consumed with professional development sessions, emergency parent meetings, kids that need your help, etc... That every few months you had to meet with every single customer to give them an update and hear back how much your work is amazing or sucks? Oh, and you have to do it over a period of 10 hours sitting in a crappy hard plastic chair.
Put aside the fact that you have little agency to affect any real change, are potentially subject to verbal or even physical abuse you can do nothing about. Then there are the shootings...
Teaching is much harder than most jobs where you can stare at a monitor and post throwaways on Hackernews. Technically harder, no, it's not physics (unless you're teaching physics), but it's still a difficult field.
You must be from the US. If the old rule of Internet chat was that someone would (eventually) draw comparison to Adolf Hitler or German National Socialism period, then the new rule on HN is someone will raise the expectation of gun violence in the US.
Because, very sadly, it is now an epidemic in the US that has no workable solution in sight because of intransigence around a 233 year old constitutional amendment in a context of intense, media-led paranoia (perhaps creating a feedback loop). "Bowling for Columbine" is 22 years old now - I don't think there's been substantial progress any of the root causes Moore called out back then.
> Why do people thinking teaching is any harder than any other job that requires a university education?
Because not every job that requires a university education is equally demanding. As you said, some of those office jobs are outright boring. Teaching is far from boring, but it can be incredibly draining as there are a lot of expectations to meet.
> including summer holiday
It is easy to look at this and ignore the fact that in order to teach properly, a teacher's workday isn't 9-5. It is in fact much longer and often work carries over in the weekend because papers need grading, lessons need to be prepared, etc, etc.
There is more to expand on here, but the way you dismissively phrased your comment makes me think you aren't really interested in constructive discussion about the subject.
I've worked as a programmer, care assistant, office clerk and for 6 months as a Maths teacher in a UK Further Education College.
The teaching was incredibly demanding - way ahead of the other jobs. 6 hours a day engaging a class of 18-year-olds. Hours of marking and prep in the evening. Extra teaching at the Easter break. Marking at Christmas. Dealing with student mental health issues, drug issues, fights between gangs.
Had to leave for my own health and 1 other teacher just walked out mid-semester - 2 others were out on long-term sick leave.
Another sign it's a tough profession: there's ~ 2,800 teaching vaccancies in the UK at the moment [1] and schools struggle to recruit.
I've nothing but respect for those teachers that do it year after year.
If the benefits and wages were so much better than "boring office jobs" then why would there be a teacher shortage in the absence of onerous requirements for entry? Why is there a teacher shortage if the pay and benefits are so good?
Though it isn't true in all states, there are onerous requirements for entry in many places. I grew up and went to college in Maryland, and the education program basically takes over your 4-year degree process. Despite enjoying tutoring and student-teaching, I balked for multiple reasons and left the program to get an ordinary BS degree.
Among those reasons were:
- the education department at my college wasted my time one too many times; academic infighting made it unnecessarily difficult to get a good advisor and complete the program
- the expectation for me to pay full-time tuition in my last year even though it would be spent working (without pay)
- seeing my "peers" get Bs and Cs for D- and F-level work in education classes and realizing the standards were way too low
- the excessive dictating of which "electives" I had to take outside of education, which frequently put me in the dump classes where the professors had no respect for the students
- yes, the less-than-stellar pay and benefits (and MD is one of the best states in the country for teacher pay!) and mandatory union membership (pre-SCOTUS ruling against it) that would follow once I jumped through these hoops
- the feeling that, even if I set aside all of these concerns, I would ultimately have no autonomy; I was already seeing that many teachers (including at the college level) just want to coast through their jobs and have not just the curriculum and textbooks but also the assignments, exams, and even daily lectures handed to them by the district, and the same districts not wanting teachers to go off-script for liability reasons too
Obviously, some of these elements were particular to my circumstances and experiences and not required by the state, but the program itself was, and even in better circumstances, it still requires a large commitment of time and money.
