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Originally Posted by Rainger99
It appears that the USA is facing a teacher shortage in the near future.
I was not a teacher but for my classmates that went into teaching, it always seemed like a nice career. You weren’t going to get rich teaching but very few of us got rich - most of us ended up middle class.
Work hard the first few years to get the lectures down and then you have to just update them. Most of them enjoyed life - not a lot of pressure and summers off. They seemed happy and they felt like they were making the world better.
Education was once the No. 1 major for college students. Now it's an afterthought. - CBS News |
As a teacher of 35 years, you don’t know very much. Teaching was my love. I worked hard. I changed my ‘lectures’ every year. They needed to be updated. We changed books every 4 years- ‘lectures’ changed. Pressure was constant. Grades given were analyzed, scrutinized and you were told that the class average was not good enough. Do something about it. Summers were spent taking classes (I have 2 Masters degrees for that) improving and learning new techniques to teach. Evenings and weekends were spent grading papers, entering the info into the computer, adjusting the next day’s lesson plan because of the things I learned grading papers, etc. I even took work with me on planes on vacation and worked on vacation sometimes. I got paid well, but not all teachers did/do. A lot are underpaid, a lot are not appreciated and they work hard to provide good education.
I am not surprised there is a shortage anywhere, and there is currently a shortage. It is here. When you can graduate college, get a job that pays $70-80,000/year, why would you want to be a teacher and get paid $30-40,000 a year? Yes, you have more free time in the summer, but that’s not the thing that draws people to a profession.
Would I change a thing? No. I loved the classroom, the students, seeing the spark when the students ‘got it’! It’s a very rewarding career.