10 reasons not to be a teacher

1. Despite your training and experience, everyone you meet tells you what you are doing wrong and how you can do it better.
2. When people find out you are a teacher, the first thing they mention is the long holidays and the short working days.
3. The legal system tells you that you have responsibility for someone else’s child in loco parentis, but the parents are the first to complain if you do something that they are incapable of doing themselves.
4. You have to teach things over which you have had no input or control because some ‘authority’ has decreed that it must be so.
5. Governments continually cut budgets and spending in areas which would genuinely help children become better people, let alone better educated.
6. One teenager at home is bad enough, so let’s give you 2,000 to deal with.
7. Your subject area is so interesting that you really love it and want to share it with others, but you spend so much time managing classroom behaviour that you don’t get to teach it so much.
8. Students just don’t seem to get the reason why they are in your class, instead of doing something more interesting, and it’s all just for the exams and tests at the end, isn’t it…
9. ‘Industry experts’ have all these great ideas about technology and applications that will make your lessons “Awesome!”, and everyone tells you that you  should be doing this, without understanding the local circumstances or providing the funding or support to help.
10. Most of your students, colleagues, parents, friends, don’t really want to listen to how you really feel about your job because, after all, you’re just “unloading” on them, and teaching is easy, and you get all those long holidays, and their children are angels, and …

Why do we do it?

Love!