Some of us even field student e-mails and phone calls at home. It takes hours for us to plan lessons, track down materials and correct papers. Perhaps it's unreasonable to expect people to comprehend the complexities of teaching, given that so many of them are hourly workers who punch time clocks and walk out the door each night without looking back or forward. I think my profession needs a PR blitz, one designed to showcase the new face of teaching, which looks very different from the one most adults experienced. Students do not sit in straight rows, behave in an orderly fashion, and learn by rote memorization, worksheets and lectures.
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.