Is Teaching the Most Stress-free Job? Not Really!

Teaching today is not what everyone other than a teacher thinks it is. The world thinks that we are the laziest and the most relaxed bunch of people with lots of vacations and free time. Everyone around us envies us for getting paid for (quote) “ simply finding out the mistakes of the students!” Our families expect us to be available at every cousin’s wedding and every uncle’s funeral because, (quote) “well, you are not the President of the country, right? Why can’t you take a leave?”

What is the reality? Is teaching today as easy as perceived by the world? In my experience, certainly no! It is just not handling a course for your entire career which does not need any kind of preparation the second time onwards. Our predecessors had that luxury. We don’t.

The students today are much smarter than us when we were students. Teaching today demands maintaining their interest and curiosity and entertaining them, which is a tedious task. We have to be on constant preparation mode, day and night, if we want to float in this profession. We should be one step ahead of our students intellectually and technologically or otherwise, we don’t earn their respect. They would look down upon us and yea, they don’t hesitate to call us out. Gone are the days of the mighty, unquestionable teachers!

I remember the advice of one of my colleagues when I told her that I wanted to take a special class for my students after the class hours. She became genuinely concerned and told me not to take special classes or else the students would give poor feedback on me! I wouldn’t say that she was wrong. We are mostly not judged by the quality of our teaching these days but by the students’ feedback, the authenticity of which, most of the employers do not care to check. So yea, we teachers have to act like marketing professionals, always trying to appease our students and their parents because our job and future depend on their whims, fancies and feedbacks.

Teachers today should have excellent documentation skills too. We spend more time on preparing teaching plans and course files and documenting everything that is going on around us than the actual process of teaching. So, if your younger sibling or son or daughter wants to be a teacher, advise them to learn how to handle Excel, Word and other basic documentation tools, or else, they will struggle a lot.

I also have heard about institutions that mandate their teachers to bring in a certain number of admissions every year to keep their job. I remember a friend who cried to me asking to help her to get a job at my institution as she most certainly would lose her job that year because she could not meet the expectations of her institution about the number of intakes she should have brought in. Also, many institutions today do not want to employ a separate admission team and so, all the clerical works related to admission from canvassing students to collecting fees are done by teachers.

On top of fulfilling all these extra expectations, teachers need to do research and publish papers in SCOPUS indexed journals. If we don’t do that, we might lose our job.

So yea, dear world, teaching today is not as easy as you think. Teachers are not a relaxed, lazy bunch of people who do not deserve the pay they get. Most of them are underpaid, desperate multi-taskers who have to go to lengths you cannot even imagine to keep their job. So, next time when you look for a teacher bride for your engineer son thinking that she would easily be able to take care of the home and attend family functions because she has a lot of free time, think again!