A few key factors clearly distinguish public school teaching from other service professions. Understanding these factors will make it easier to see why teaching is not often viewed as an attractive option by bright college graduates. Isolation from Other Professionals Follow a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or an architect for a day, and it becomes obvious that they spend as much time interacting with their colleagues as they do serving their clients. A doctor discusses the meaning of an X-ray with other physicians and healthcare workers, a lawyer consults with associates on trial strategy, and engineers and architects work in teams to develop new prototypes and designs. Interactions with other professionals stimulate and push these people to new levels of performance in both the art and the craft of their profession.
Teachers work in a different world.
Roland Barth likened American teachers to a group of preschoolers engaged in parallel play. Although they may work in a building with other teachers and even use the same materials and follow the same schedule, they rarely turn to one another during the school day except during their thirty-minute lunch period, where informal norms often forbid any kind of professional talk. This dearth of collegial stimulation would be bad enough if teaching were a profession with a certain and finite knowledge base. But the problems of teaching are ever changing, and absolute solutions are usually not to be found. Successful teaching is a mixture of art and craft honed through experience.