I have three potentially full-time jobs. (1) Taking diverse and uneven resources and within the bounds of (a) state frameworks, (b) school- and (c) district-level requirements making a curriculum with daily lessons; (2) using this creation to teach kids every day, and to work with them however they need it, including after-school activities and tutoring; and (3) devising methods for collecting data on their progress, collecting that data, analyzing it, and using it in the performance of (1) and (2).
Most people seem to think that only (2) is the full-time job of teaching, and that (1) and (3) are mere periphery requirements. These people are wrong. I could easily fill a full 40+ hour week doing any one of them, and realistically I spend 20–30+ hours weekly on each, sometimes skimping on one (generally (3), or parts of it) for a week or two and then spending a maddening weekend or taking a sick-day (or both) to catch up.
I would gladly do any one of these jobs—I think I would even enjoy doing any one of them—or alternate between them from semester to semester or year to year. Ideally, if I were doing only one of them and two others were doing the other two, we would work in very close collaboration.
But giving each of the three the attention it ought to get is difficult-bordering-on-impossible, and this is one of the reasons I will not be able to keep doing this job forever.
That’s why teachers get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Um, this sucks. This sucks more than being a lawyer sucks.
And the fact that I’m saying this, effectively advising you that what you’re saying in the last graf that you’ll have to do is correct, is damn depressing when I consider how very important public school teachers are to, well, the future health of our politeia. I mean, it’s clearly driving you nuts. I’m not even sure making the salary you ought to make would in fact make this job bearable: lots of people get paid huge amounts of money and don’t have jobs that make them happy.
Don’t get me wrong, lots of people end up living okay lives in spite of the effects public school teachers have and haven’t had on them. I see them all the time in my line of work. They’re crippled in all sorts of ways, and their formal inabilities represent huge economic losses (mostly in terms of lost economic productivity, but also in terms of social services) to our country, especially compared to their counterparts in our competitor nations, but, if it’s any comfort, I seriously doubt that much of the damage that led to their seeing folks like me is really attributable to the deficiency of education professionals like you.
Which is to say, “get out as early as you can / and [definitely] have [some] kids yourself.”