Calling teachers - Do you enjoy it, would you honestly recommend it?

[TitsalinaBumSquash]

I'm at the point of choosing what I'm going to do at uni.

I keep coming back to teaching, I always arrive back to it despite trying to head in different directions because I've heard it's soul destroying and the media does nothing to show otherwise.

So can teachers tell me,

What age do you teach?
Do you enjoy it?
Any pros/cons?
Would you honestly recommend it as a career to your friends, family?

I left due to the poor work/life balance. If you are a perfectionist, then that’s also hard as mostly you only have time for ‘ok’ or ‘quite good’. All my friends got out of the classroom, either out of teaching altogether or into jobs which were easier but connected loosely to teaching. The only friend I have who still teaches works in a grammar so no behaviour issues.

I wouldn’t recommend that my kids do it as a job, btw.

I teach secondary and I love being in the classroom. Children are great and it's never dull.

Holidays are great but you often don't get as much time off as people think. You aren't really a professional - so much monitoring and lots of schools are going for a thing where all teachers just teach the same lesson at the same time. There's no flexibility. You can't pop out for lunch or take a long weekend. You don't get days off for weddings and family parties.

I teach secondary. Love it and always have. I wouldn’t want to do another job.

However it is very stressful and you have to be physically on top form.

I'm really trying to put my own dd off teaching. The amount of work teachers are expected to do at home is huge. The workload in school is massive. Trying to be inclusive to SEND & behaviour issues is sometimes impossible. School politics can be hard to negotiate.
Mainly it's the work/life balance. The pay in no way reflects the hours worked.

I always seem to be the exception but I love it. I love my school, we have fantastically creative and quirky kids, equally quirky but loving staff. I'm teaching the infants but I've done various classes throughout my time. I love seeing a university ready nearly grown up in the street who stops me and talks about the times we played parachute games or went on that trip to the farm when they were 6.

I was really heartened to hear a teacher at the recent online parents evening saying they've been doing it for 34 years and still love it. He's really on the ball, keeps up with technology and developments, known for being a great teacher so some people do stick it out!

And my grammar and punctuation is generally far better than I would lead you to believe based upon my previous post. And I have heard of commas. 😶

My niece loves it.,

She is Head of English in a PRU and thoroughly enjoys working with the kids that don't fit in well to big mainstream schools.

She hated mainstream secondary as she felt SEN support was rubbish and that they were letting children down (in that particular school) so she moved to a PRU and hasn't looked back.

She enjoys getting kids who have never had an award of certificate in their lives through functional skills English tests. Finds it really fulfilling,

I teach year 6 in an inner city primary. As much as I enjoy the actual teaching and seeing the difference we make to the children (a large number of who have difficult home lives), I wouldn't recommend it. The endless paper trails, new teaching trends that need to be trialled but end up fizzling out, pressure to teach a balanced curriculum but no time to do it, lack of respect from parents, lack of respect from children. Do I need to go on?!

Early years teacher on maternity leave.

I do love it but it's hard aligning what I know about early childhood development with the expectations of school leaders.

The holidays are fantastic but the job wouldn't be worth the salary without them.

I would recommend it but with some caveats; it's not a family friendly profession in most schools and contrary to popular opinion opportunities to advance can be limited.

If you have a chance to do a degree in something with highly transferable skills, maybe a language or maths, then do that before doing a teaching qualification. I did a degree in early years education and whilst I have transferable skills now after 10 years of teaching, my degree itself isn't much use outside of education.

Does anyone mind telling me what the did for their undergrad before going into teaching?