Teaching: The toughest job you’ll ever love

To the editor:

Teaching is a tough job. no doubt about it. It is demanding, time consuming and difficult. That is one way you find out if you really want to be a teacher.

Once you realize how tough it is and you still really want to do it, be a teacher. You know you are in the right profession. Teaching has many wonderful rewards, and they are not the same for everyone, but here are a few most teachers will recognize:

Working with students helps you to see that everyone has something special about them. Everyone, and each student, has so much potential to realize themselves, become fine young men and women. In short, teaching is inspiring.

Teachers have infinite ways to express their creativity. Every day is a new opportunity, every day is different. Teaching is never boring or monotonous. Faculty meetings might be that way. but not classroom teaching.

Teachers have the opportunity to use all that they know and have learned from other teachers, their teachers. Teachers always eventually learn what patience, kindness and love can mean in a child's life at school. Not an indulgent kind of love but the love that means you want what is best for each student in your class. It means the willingness to use discipline, high expectations, and accountability to do what is best for each student.

Teaching is also exhausting. And here are a few of the challenges of the profession most teachers will recognize: The work is never done, not really. A lot of the work is done out of school, grading homework, creating lesson plans, meetings, talking on the phone with parents, supervisors and colleagues.

Teachers have better compensation these days, but still generally far below other professions. Teachers can be harshly criticized for not doing enough by people who simply do not understand how much the teacher is already doing. All children have hearts of gold but at times they can be difficult, obnoxious, demanding, disrespectful, ungrateful, and insensitive to each other and to their teachers.

Teaching is a tough, demanding job with relatively small compensation and without much appreciation, recognition, or material benefits. But teaching is not in the end as difficult as parenting; not even close in most cases. Parents are the ones who worry all the time, have all the responsibility, all the obligations, and most, if not all, the consequences when it comes to their children. Raising children is the most demanding job in this world; and the most important too.

Teachers do know how difficult the job of parenting can be. They learn this either by being parents themselves, remembering their own parents and their struggles, or just by seeing what the parents of their students go through. Still and all it is good for teachers; especially young teachers without children, to be reminded how tough the job of parenting can be. And to remember how important it is to listen to the parents of their students, to listen, mostly, without judgment, and to listen more than they talk.

Teachers and parents both recognize how difficult their jobs can be. And most teachers will know how much those parents appreciate what they do for their children. They will feel loved not just by their students but by the parents of their students too. And that is one benefit of becoming a teacher that few others professions can provide. It lasts a lifetime.

- Jim Turner, Fairfield