Teachers who've had other demanding professional careers, how do they compare?

[LucySnoweOrBust]

I'm thinking of retraining as a teacher, and one of the things that puts me off the most is that I constantly hear teachers saying that the hours are grindingly long.

I get that the hours can eat up your evenings and weekends without extra pay.

But honestly I don't see how this is any worse than many other professions or fields, which carry the same expectation.

Being a grad student in an institute where 60-70 hour weeks were fairly common, while living off the smell of an oily rag and with no job security, was no picnic, and the postdocs had it worse. On the flip side, with academia, at least we had the freedom to pop in and out to attend to personal matters. (This was before I had kids).

Who has tried both, and how would you say they compare?

I did a year in a call centre as a trainer and am a teacher for many years. The key difference is that with my ordinary 9-5, I could leave work behind me at the end of the day. With teaching, you always have to be prepared for the next day no matter what, so you might have to work til 9 if you've got 8 classes the next day. Preparation is a huge part of the job as obviously you can't prepare for further classes in the classes you're teaching. That is what takes the most time. The summer holidays in the UK don't really make up for 9 months of working so intensely in my opinion and I say that as someone who taught in the UK for 10 years.

From 8.15 to 4.00 you are actually g a role, often will no break at all and if you are lucky you can nip to the toilet. It is the constant state of being ‘on’ that is exhausting. There is no going to grab a drink to give yourself two minutes break if you have had a difficult morning.

My brother gave up a lucrative city job and retrained to be a teacher because he never saw his children awake. Now he works just as hard for less money. However he does see his children because he teachers at the school they attend and has a good discount off the fees, a great perk!

His children all do extremely well at school also and part of this is that school is so big in their lives.

Pros and cons.

I was once a project manager for high level business accounts. Then I owned and ran my own two companies.

I decided to retrain as a teacher.

My PM job and owning my businesses were seen as extremely stressful.

Ahahahahahahaha! How I look back and laugh.

I've worked in high pressure strategic jobs and it is very different. It's the intensity of the school day plus the demands of planning in great detail for different ability levels, plus marking, plus paperwork, plus constant new initiatives..... incredibly demanding. You do, obviously, get school holidays, but you really need them and use a lot of them for work. In my experience it's manageable if you're in a supportive school. But some schools get into a very critical mindset and it's soul destroying to feel you are slogging your guts out and it is never good enough.
I retrained in my late 40s and have done it for 10 years, no regrets but it has not been easy. I also saw a lot of people who dropped out because they couldn't cope with going back to the beginning. All those qualities and experience that everyone tells you will make you an excellent teacher only go so far.... there is a massive amount to learn, so much more to it than you think.
But in a good school and once you start to know what you're doing it can be the best job in the world.

A friend is getting out of teaching. Whilst all jobs have an element of continuous improvement, she is fed up with the never-ending expectation. Nobody ever says "well done", it's always "but why didn't you also do X,Y & Z". Nothing is ever good enough.
The stupid thing is that teachers are meant to say nice encouraging things to the pupils but SLT don't do similar to teachers.

She is also fed up of being graded on other peoples' work. If you are an engineer, doctor etc then you are appraised on your work or that of your team (who you can bollock/fire if they don't perform). As a teacher, you are appraised on the work of surly teenagers whom you cannot fire. You have to be endlessly supportive of them, despite the lack of any reciprocal regard.

She is working her notice and is looking forward to having time for hobbies again. At the moment it is work/sleep/repeat.

As a teacher I felt constantly on edge-it's totally unpredictable and a huge responsibility and you can't put anything on the back burner like you might be able to do in other jobs . You have to be constantly responsive to changing circumstances ...it's very hard to be yourself the best teachers I saw tended to be constantly 'in teacher mode' and didn't let their guard down.
You also permanently feel on display and judged from pupils and staff...although I was chatting to an ex teacher friend and we said sometimes this is useful as you always know in teaching whether you're doing a good job as if you're not you'll have behaviour problems, parents in your back, other teachers supporting and observing you

Thanks for all your replies! They've been very helpful.

What I'm taking from this is that it's not the hours as such that are the issue (not if you're used to or expecting those anyway), it's the intense and relentless nature of the job, plus politics and infeasible expectations.

Before I went back into teaching I had a 'better' job in the sense that the pay was higher, it was more intellectually stimulating and there were more perks like foreign travel. It was classed as being a stressful environment but it was less stressful than teaching. I always had a lunch break of some sort (and there was somewhere to get food: you didn't have to bring in a sandwich or a pot noodle every day) whereas now I rarely get a break between 8 and 3.30. I worked long hours which I still do now but I very rarely worked at the weekends like I have to now.

My work was more contained in the office before. All I had to do on Sunday evening was get an outfit sorted for the next day. Now I have to check my emails on Sunday to see if there is anything I need to act on immediately on arrival at school, ensure that all the books are marked and that I am clear about what I am doing the following day and what I will need to prepare in the morning.

On top of this I teach young children and the pressure we are under to achieve results is horrible. I have to try to ensure the children don't feel that pressure but sometimes it is unavoidable

I have done both and would agree with all of the above.

Plus, schools can often be very low in comfort and facilities for staff. Noisy. Old buildings, so often boiling or freezing. They are often based within housing so no cafe to pop out to at lunchtime. Very little privacy. Not much comfortable seating. I have worked in schools with only one single staff toilet!

Each of those factors doesn’t sound like much, but combined with a stressful role it can really grind you down.

I am in my forties and this is the first summer I have had the pleasure of air conditioning in my workplace!

I've been a research scientist and a teacher.

As a scientist I worked 60-70 hours a week. As a teacher I dream of a working week so short!

I worked in financial services and in the City before teaching.

It's the sheer intensity. Previous poster is spot on. You basically perform for 7 hours a day. It's a physically and mentally draining experience, giving to up to 150 students a day (plus the staff etc) and that tires you out. Constantly dealing with students, some of whom have decided you are some type of antichrist because you insist they work like everyone else is. Getting told off for not responding to emails (was teaching, sorry, I don't stop the class to do admin!) and SLT will pick holes in everything. Being desperate for a wee but having to wait an hour because there's no time to go....

Add to that 7 hours of madness enough admin/planning/prep to fill another few hours and by the end of the day you are properly tired.

It's a great job but trust me when I say at this time of year, teachers are hanging in there by the ends of their fingernails and counting down the days til the summer.

At one school in which I worked there was not a time to have a drink or lunch or even go to the toilet.

Every possible moment to do one of these things was instead filled with meetings (average of 9 each week... good grief), supervising playgrounds, sorting out squabbles, dealing with delinquents, receiving and distributing stock, taking phone calls, talking to parents who came in to complain.

There was no PPA time and no classroom assistant to help me do any of these things.

When we needed the toilet, my colleague in the next classroom and I took turns to supervise both classes by standing in the corridor between the two rooms.

(I left.)

Perhaps the toilets are a waste of space if teachers don’t actually use them?

For me, the wake up call was when I banged my head on an IWB projector arm before 8.00 one morning (badly enough to fall on the ground) but, rather than take a moment to sit down and recover, I just got up and kept on rushing around desperately trying to get ready for the day.

Lucy Kellaway left her position as a journalist with the Financial Times to retrain as a maths teacher and has written lots of articles detailing the experience... really brilliant insight into how intense and exhausting, but wonderful, she has found it.

Sorry point of that entry was to say you could Google her articles for some further insights!

I saw the govt ‘become a teacher’ website and had to laugh when it described a typical day as beginning at 9.00 by ‘taking registration.’

I would often have an hour of prep, a staff meeting and a short first session done by 9.00!

I used to be in academia. One thing I find incredibly stressful about teaching is that a huge part of the workload is meaningless crap that I've been told to do by some arsehole slt who is thick as shit.

During my PhD and postdoc I regularly worked long days and weekends but I was doing really interesting, good quality science. There was a point to it all. My hard work paid off because I got good results and publications and the field progressed.

In teaching I will spend most of this weekend catching up on marking books with various coloured pens to get my hod off my back. My students will learn very little from this exercise because I give them verbal feedback in lessons, which is a much better way for them to learn. I will then spend time in the week getting the kids to respond in another coloured pen and then I will have to mark their responses in yet another colour and then photocopy a selection of their books for evidence of a 'learning dialogue'.

It's all absolute bullshit and is a total waste of time but if I don't do it then I will face even more micromanagement from the aforementioned arsehole slt.

I do love teaching but it is far more stressful day-to-day than anything else I've ever done. (The holidays are fab though)

Thanks again. lulu12345 - I will definitely google those articles, as it is specifically maths that I want to teach. :) And thanks for all the other helpful replies, too!

I love teaching when I have the opportunity - I constantly hear this from teachers - it's just everything else that goes with the job that grinds people down. And jobs in education outside the classroom are like hen's teeth!