Nobody Wants to Teach Anymore

Everyone should know why.

Jessica Wildfire
7 min readAug 6, 2022
Photo by Carli Jeen on Unsplash

It’s getting pretty bad.

Schools are resorting to all kinds of last ditch measures. They’re planning to hold classes three or four days a week. They’re hiring teachers from outside the country. They’re recruiting military vets. They’re letting college students with no training into the classroom. They’re not going to be interns. They’re going to be in charge of everyone’s kids.

We’re not just talking about K-12 schools, either. The shortages have started hitting colleges so hard that, once again, they’re talking about increasing class sizes and upping our loads.

Nobody wants to teach.

Not anymore.

Almost nobody respects teachers.

Teacher shortages have been a long time coming. They’ve been losing us for a solid ten years now, maybe longer. The solutions to every year’s teacher shortage makes the problem even worse. The teachers who stay wind up doing more work for less pay. We grind up our souls, and we’re rewarded with post-it notes and chocolate bars.

More teachers get fed up.

They quit.

Everyone secretly thinks they can teach because they watched Mr. Holland’s Opus. They don’t know the first thing…

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