Stress in the Teaching Profession

Lots of people think teaching is easy. Spending 8 hours a day with children teaching them multiplication tables and reading books isn't nearly as difficult as teachers say it is, right? Little do people who think like this know that what goes into teaching is so much more than just babysitting a bunch of kids and reading books. There are lesson plans to write, meetings to go, parents to talk with, papers to grade and the list goes on and on. Even most college students preparing to be teachers don't fully understand everything that a teacher does on a daily basis. The only way to fully appreciate a full teacher's workload is to spend a substantial amount of time in a classroom. At Luther College, education students are required to spend a month in a classroom actively observing before applying for the teacher education program. However, I don't think that this short amount of time is enough for someone to fully grasp all of the duties of a teacher. While the college student may observe papers being graded, it is rare in the month of January that they will see report cards being made or many of the other things that occur before Christmas break, or at the end of the year. I have spent a J-term in a social studies classroom and I worked in an elementary general music classroom for an entire semester. There were lots of things I learned about teaching throughout the entire semester in the music class that I didn't even get a glimpse in during my month in the social studies classroom. While it is very important to have college students interested in teaching observe classrooms, many won't fully understand what it takes to be a teacher until they get into their first real teaching job. Teaching is hard, tiring work, and every teacher will tell you, the first three years are the hardest. College graduates often feel overwhelmed because teaching isn't something that can be effectively taught to them while in college. Good teaching is developed with experience of working with kids and time in the classroom. Half of all teachers change professions after 3 years of teaching because they didn't go in fully understanding the immense amount of work it takes to be a teacher, and as a result get burned out. Teaching is such a fulfilling career, but it doesn't come without a lot of work and time.