An earlier post asked which was harder: Teaching or Rocket Science. It received some great responses. Here is one of them:
I’ll add my vote here. Former engineer, now a teacher for 17 years. Teaching is much harder work. It takes a really long time to get very good at it (which TFA and other organizations like it don’t seem to grasp). It also takes a unique blend of patience, thick-skinned tolerance of minor (and sometimes major) injustices, humility and hopefulness that might be thought of as love.
I work with teenagers and I think the hardest thing I do is walk that constant, minute-by-minute tightrope walk of trusting in the goodness of kids while maintaining the integrity of everything you and every other adult in the school has worked so long and hard to build. You have to believe in the kids, or you might as well not even be there. But then again, they will often let you down.
I think the only people who think teaching is easier than working a “real” job are those who have never taught. I have watched a half-dozen smart, confident people come from highly successful careers outside teaching and get chewed up and spit out in less than a semester. I wonder, if the deformers get their way and we end up with a teaching profession that makes 40-50% less than it does now, where they are ever going to find people to do this very difficult job.
Just today, I got an email from a former student who I convinced to try my AP Chemistry class when he thought he wasn’t “smart enough”. I worked my tail off helping him convince himself he could succeed at that level and he gained enough confidence that he changed his future plans and enrolled in college. He earned his engineering degree and was proudly informing me that he had just taken his first job. He is just one in a thousand kids that have passed through my classroom, and I hadn’t thought about him since he graduated and the next batch of diamonds in the rough came through my door and began consuming my time and energy. But he said in his email, “There have been four distinct times when I have consciously made a decision that has forever changed the course of my life and you were involved in one of them . . . Your class changed my life . . . I can definitely say I would not be where I am today if you had not been my teacher.” That’s what keeps us going, right? But in this brave new world of VAM we’re entering, what teacher will ever have time to waste on changing someone’s life?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This was a nice surprise to wake up to a fellow chemistry teacher reflecting on the deeper rewards of his/her many years of work with his own specific students. Thanks for running it, Diane. It takes many years of day-by-day, and minute by minute, experience to actually gain such a perspective, and I’m not sure people who haven’t actually been there understand how very rewarding it is.
Yes, it adds up. There will come more and more days when your students face bafflement, frustration, fear, or incomprehension and you do know how to help them, and you will do that, and it will work. Toward the end of his career, Piaget remarked that there must be “levels” of cognitive development beyond the four discrete steps he had explored. Yes, my own career shows me that we can find whole new dimensions of mental clarity through the experience of interactive teaching. Insight, intuition, cognitive empathy, vision… my learning curve when I’m in my classroom is greater now than it has ever been. As your reader noticed, the long and arduous journey is fueled by the reward of seeing our living students arise to become themselves.
What do we tell our young teachers, then: those who we hope will stay at this profession for the long haul, and carry it on past our own lifespans?
On Friday, our district-wide professional development day gave me the opportunity to get to know a strong, clear-eyed first-year math teacher. We’re in our pilot year of implementing the new, RttT-mandated data-driven teacher evaluation system, and we all had Ipads logged into our newly assigned personal self-assessment and quantitative goal-setting accounts.
My colleague had realized he was facing some kind of standards-driven train wreck in his students’ math background, but he was more curious than daunted. They can’t connect anything, they can’t use one lesson in another, or even one idea from a lesson to take their own step. He thinks he shows them how to understand, but then they beg, “Please, just show us how we’re supposed to do the problem.” And then they can’t actually do any problems at all; they’re just lost, sorting through their benchmarked jumble of algorithms and model gibberish. He was very interested to see their density labs, which I happened to have in my bag, and which showed them starting to actually apply a math skill to physically and cognitively solve new problems they encounter.
Research is showing us that the focus on test scores is disastrous for teaching, but this young man is being required to set a quantitative goal for himself, so he can participate in being held accountable for his students’ learning. By how many MCAS points is he going to increase their scores?
Unfortunately, at around 1 pm they realized that the mind-numbingly expensive data-driven teacher evaluation program we were using wasn’t saving our input. We were all instructed to just log off. Yes, this was the whole district. Was the day a colossal write off? Actually, we learned a lot.
Thank you to the original poster and chemtchr for such clear and beautifully-written pieces. It does take years to gain such a perspective, and no quick fix, scripted lesson, magic bullet, 5-week training course, technology gimmick, or pd pep talk will ever substitute for time in the classroom engaging with real students. As an 8th grade teacher, I also really appreciated the original post’s reflection on working with teenagers. Reading the wise and insightful words of these contributors was a wonderful way to start the morning.
Thanks fr printing that wonderful description of a teacher’s life and why it’s worth it. But some of what makes it so hard–and victories rarer than they should–is that we have designed the school and the job for failure–where teachers are trying to go up a down escalator. Some day we will have time to go back to the real issue–how to improve the conditions of teaching essential to the success of students. Alas, we are forced to spend our time these days just trying to fight those who would make it even worse for both students and teachers. And the world we’d love to make possible seems further and further out of reach for too many of them. .
Reblogged this on CENTURY21SCHOOLS and commented:
I love this article because it really shows the experience that is needed to be good.
Engineering is hardest, because of the risk involvement in the job