>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

Teaching not difficult or stressful? Teachers don't need to bring their "A" game?
When I call you clueless in the next sentence, please don't take it as 'anti-social sniping', take it as a simple statement of fact.
You are clueless on seemingly every facet of the topic of education. I've done much teaching in my life: public high school, college ensembles, private lessons, section coaching, master classes, summer camps and substitute teaching. Speaking from experience, some of those jobs are easy, but there is nothing easy about public K-12 teaching. If you don't bring your "A" game, you will be eaten alive by students, administrators and parents (in that order). Teaching is actually more difficult for bad teachers, which is why 50% of teachers quit within the first 5 years of their career. I don't imagine business intimidates that many MBAs away from the profession.
My dad was a business man as well as a teacher, so I won't dispute that running a business is also difficult.
Let's be honest, this 'good intellectual debate' is neither good nor intellectual, and it's hardly even a debate.


It's shit like this, DFT. (emphasis added below)

That aside, being an educator is a noble profession. Certainly like any job if you care you make it more difficult for yourself - if you don't then you make it easier. But being a salary employee isn't even in the same ballpark as owning and worrying about your own business. There's very little risk in clocking into a teaching job. And yes grading papers over a TV dinner is probably not fun, but stressful? Nay.

Seeing how you gave your own circumstantial evidence, I'd like to do that as well. My high school teachers were largely a joke. Ms. Williams was a rather large lady who taught my junior and senior year English. She started both years telling us how much she despised teaching grammar, so she didn't teach it. She promised we'd watch lots of videos though, and we did. Terrible waste of time.

It took Mr. Wright nearly a year to teach us the fundamentals of writing a check and balancing our checkbook. He spent ten minutes in class every day, then assigned us busy work while he left for the rest of the period to smoke in the teacher's lounge. True story.

Mr. Amos never taught us anything in our Marketing class. He was in the classroom maybe an eighth of the year, and we didn't do a single lesson plan except when there was a substitute teacher. Mr. Dismuke was quite brilliant as a Mathematician. But his oratory skills were as engaging as a 1960s robot, and most kids barely passed or failed his courses. Mr. Qualls was there to produce high school plays and nothing else. It was great for you if you were in one of his plays, but if you weren't you spent the period in a classroom by yourselves doing absolutely nothing. Mrs. Ruth always thought I was drawing hidden satanic messages in my art class, so she would take it upon herself to "censor" my art. That is she would paint or mark over it. Mr. Maynard told me once he didn't like me, and once he refused to hand a test out to me because he was sure I'd fail it anyways. He gave me a zero and I eventually failed his course. Mr. Davis let us sleep in his class. Mr. Williams used to let the underaged girls massage his shoulders during class. Etc. All true stories from my personal experience. And I could go on and on.

I can't remember a single teacher that brought their "A" game. Not one. And surprisingly not a single one of them was "eaten alive by students, administrators and parents (in that order)."