Teachers have to plan lessons to accommodate a range of learning styles and intellectual abilities. They have to design assessment tasks that generate information that goes far beyond report card grades. They have to find ways to deal with disruptive, sometimes violent students, while keeping the rest of the class on-track. In many cases, they have to teach with limited time, few resources and with little parental or community support. The general public just doesn't have a clue how relentlessly demanding the act of teaching is - probably because we educators tend to be such a modest, selfless lot.
Teachers are unskilled and uncomfortable at blowing their own horns.
I see this all the time in my little elementary school in Surry. This is a place where every teacher does extraordinary things for kids, where each of us is a lifelong learner, where we team up to bring out the best in our students and the best in each other. Thanks to administrative and parental support, we have evolved into a remarkable group of professionals, but this evolution has been largely unnoticed and unheralded outside of our school community. We need to start telling our stories. This summer one of my colleagues spent two weeks immersed in hands-on science training for teachers.