A reader writes in response to an earlier post:

I too started with degrees in physics and engineering (and later an M.Ed. that you will hear about). By choice, I walked out of an engineering job, and a few days later into a high-school classroom several hundred miles away as a full-time science teacher (they probably wouldn’t let me do that nowadays). I never found the job hard, just fun and exhausting. That first year they gave me five classes and four preparations. The other teachers in the science department looked at me strangely when I told them that – I was the new guy, I had never taught before: two preps were desirable, three was considered the maximum and difficult, four was tantamount to suicide. They waited for me to collapse. It took until February. And I was designing the curriculum for each course that I taught on a day-to-day basis: Physics Level I, Physics Level II, Chemistry Level I, and Chemistry Level II. I was out for a week with flu probably brought on by exhaustion. After that I learned to pace myself a little better. You see I was also taking a course at night toward earning my M.Ed., which was a requirement in my contract, and when spring semester had started at the University I was hosting student interns into my classes so they could earn their teaching certificates! I did that because I could earn enough tuition credits to pay for my M.Ed. I continued teaching for another 15 years at all levels (elementary through college), including teaching a graduate-level course to elementary school teachers at the University on how to make computer-based instructional videos with software I developed on the fly. This was about 35 or 40 years before Khan Academy… there’s more, but you get the picture. Now, I have some advice for people who want a single-point statistic to measure teacher performance …………. I’m sorry, they won’t let me print that in a nice blog like this.