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"Unfortunately, teaching is not a very attractive profession to many people qualified to teach. Low pay and long hours, dead end opportunity in terms of greater career advancement, and dim-wit administrators are all part of the picture."

Yes, you are soooooo right. I love children. I love to teach. When I finish homeschooling my own children, I doubt that I'll be tempted to enter the bureaucratic maze of American public education. Sad, but true. I'll probably volunteer as a literacy volunteer when I find the time, to help all the folks who never learned to read in school. :)

I love children. I love to teach

Same here. But, oddly enough, "loving children," and "loving teaching," too often has very little to do with the profession of teaching in comparison with other time-consuming tasks. The teaching part of teaching I always liked -- and, if that was actually the JOB, then, I might still want to be a teacher right now. But, teaching is NOT what most teachers do for the vast majority of their time in the classroom. If they do teach, it is almost incidental.

joathome, BTW, it's nice to chat with you again too. I was thinking about what I just wrote here, and I realized this: the one place where I felt I was able to teach was in higher education. Because, there, I had a BLOCK of time to teach, uninterupted, and TIME to plan. But, on the elementary level, I would try and try to plan what I wanted to do, and there was simply NEVER enough time for me to PLAN and then DO it. I never ever once came home from working in an elementary school or middle school feeling like this: "Wow! I had a good day today! I did everything I wanted to do!"

But, in higher ed, I actaually DID have days when I came home and thought: "Wow! I had a great class tonight! I got to everything I wanted to do -- and, MORE than I planned, and it was GREAT!"

If I teach again in the near future, it will probably be in higher ed -- because there, I felt some success. In elementary and middle schools, despite improvements in the students' learning, higher test scores, etc., all the rest of it -- I never once felt like I had a successful day. Never once. Because I knew: I wanted to do THIS today, but because of THIS cr*p I had to deal with today, I DIDN'T GET TO IT. AGAIN. It's a terrible feeling.

And, one more thing, joathome -- gee, you reall got me started here!

It may sound like I dismissed my students' success as the measure for my own success as a teacher. But, I didn't -- that's why I know I really WAS a successful teacher.

The struggle I described to you was a very private struggle raging inside of me: this desire to set goals AND to achieve my daily goals in teaching. I did not like that I always felt I had reached high, and fallen short. Yes, I still had success with my students. Yet, in my own heart: why can't I ever have ONE day where I can feel GREAT about my job as a teacher at the end of the day? I felt great about my students, but, looking at TEACHING made me feel frustrated in my desire and the result. In teaching, aiming high means: I am always coming up short. But, yes, I am having success with my students, and I guess that should count more in my own private scorecard.

But, I came to teaching after being in other professions. In other professions, there is a sense of completeness, of finishing a project, and the feeling of accomplishment that comes with that. In teaching, it is unfinished business at all times. As soon as my student reaches this learning objective, I do not see my task as a teacher as "done" -- it is NOT done, because now, I have this OTHER learning objective in mind. And this feeling of NEVER being able to say: I am finished for today (as I am always taking a ton of work home), is so frustrating. I am never finished in teaching. Perhaps over a decade or more, I would have been able to handle that, or with the help of a mentor I could have redirected that feeling, but, instead, day in and day out, I would come home feeling, in some way, like a failure. And, no one can stand to go to work everyday knowing that regardless of how much one does accomplish, it is not nearly enough, at least in my view.