Teaching is one of the most rewarding careers. You get to inspire, support, and drive your learners to believe in their potential.
We all remember at least one teacher from our childhood who made a significant impact on us or even inspired us to become a teacher.
Your role as a teacher involves completing several tasks to support your students’ learning processes.
A teaching career has many benefits– and knowing them gives you a broad understanding of the career, helping you decide if it’s right for you.
In this article, we explore all the benefits of becoming a teacher to help you understand the beauty of choosing a career in education.
A Day in the Life of a Teacher
Your daily activities as a teacher are designed around your learners. The activities are varied, and all days are different.
Your day will begin before your learners troop into class when you’re organizing their learning space and materials and preparing yourself mentally. This may also be the time for staff meetings before lessons begin. When the learners come in, you start by welcoming them, taking attendance, creating a lovely environment for interactive learning, and making morning announcements.
Your teaching sessions will be structured with a few breaks for you and the learners to catch a break. All the activities from the beginning to the end of the school day are designed with the learners in mind for optimal learning.
Your day as an educator never ends when the school day does. After-school activities such as planning for the next day’s lessons, setting tests, marking, and grading them are as essential as teaching.
School programs are dynamic depending on whether you teach primary, secondary, or the subject you teach. The profession is also quite dynamic making your days to vary from each other.
However, if you like variety and dread an environment where you do the same activities repeatedly, teaching would be an excellent fit for you.
Benefits of Being a Teacher
Benefits of teaching span from personal development to contributions to society. You inspire and guide young minds by providing the necessary guidance for them to unlock their full potential.
Here are some of the benefits of the teaching career that leaves a lasting imprint on generations:
1. Job stability
All 50 U.S. states reported teacher shortages in the 2022-2023 school year. Teachers are always in demand and teachers remain a significant priority for states and worldwide.
Your teaching skills are also useful across borders, allowing you to teach in different states and overseas.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the demand for kindergarten and elementary school teachers to grow by 7% from 2020 to 2030. The demand for high school teachers is projected to grow by 8% from 2020 to 2030.
Even with digital and technological transformations in the education sector, there will always be a need for a human teacher. Teaching is about shaping minds, fostering human connections, and inspiring children for optimal learning resulting to an unlimited demand for your teaching services.
2. Long summer vacation
Your work schedule in teaching allows you more time with your family and friends. The teaching career gives you paid time off for holidays, summer breaks, and seasonal breaks in the winter and spring. Although you will work hard all year round preparing your lessons, marking and grading your learner’s test, your approach is flexible.
You get time for personal development, self-care, travel, and rejuvenation giving you a healthy work-life balance.
In addition, you can earn additional income by teaching summer schools during your summer break. The summer break also give you time to refine your teaching skills, increasing your chances for a promotion and a higher salary by taking professional development courses.
3. Dynamic environment
Your daily activities will involve change, progress, and meeting the needs of your learners, providing a dynamic working environment. A dynamic learning environment challenges your students to perfect their skills, competencies, and interests while intentionally focusing on creating new ones. This allows you to experience the joy of watching your learners grow in diverse ways.
In addition, a dynamic learning environment gives you ease of mind, allowing you to give your best.
Applying various teaching strategies and creating engaging also creates a dynamic learning environment inspiring you your learners for better outcomes.
4. Making connections
Teaching allows you to create meaningful connections with your students, their parents, administrators, and fellow teachers.
Some students want to maintain long-lasting relationships, remain in contact even after school, and share updates throughout their lives. Such relationships are significant to the learners since they may provide them with support and stability they may not have in their homes.
Forming lasting support networks is essential for professional growth, which then results in deep personal satisfaction.
5. Continuous learning
As a teacher, you are a perpetual learner. Teaching allows you to continually broaden your knowledge and expertise in your subject area and stay informed on new teaching techniques.
If you are a certified teacher, you can acquire additional credentials to help you teach better and effectively attend to the diverse learning abilities in your class.
Additional credentials such as special education, instructional technology specialists, guidance, and counseling make you more attractive to employers. They may impact your salary depending on your contract agreement.
Also, as you teach you also learn new perspectives from your students, giving you cross-generational insights.
6. Shape the mind of next generations
Teachers play the role of mentors, parents, facilitators, and role models to their students, giving them the necessary skills and knowledge to succeed socially and academically.
Your continuous interactions with learners place you in a vantage point to develop their creativity and imagination. This can encourage learners to think beyond the classroom context, explore new ideas, and express themselves creatively.
In addition, you can promote positive values and attitudes. This involves instilling in them a sense of tolerance, commitment to social justice, respect for others, responsibility, and empathy.
Through your patience, kindness, and positivity, you can build in them confidence and self-esteem.
You can also grow in them a feeling of achievement and self-appreciation by giving them positive feedback and supporting them to realize their full potential.
7. Opportunities to be Creative and Innovative
Teaching presents you with limitless opportunities to be creative and innovative. Creativity in the classroom helps you capture and maintain your learners’ attention resulting to a meaningful, realistic, and motivating learning environment.
Creativity and innovativeness in the classroom encourage the development of higher-order cognitive skills in your learners. Such skills include critical thinking, problem-solving, and making connections between subjects.
In addition, creative teaching skills enhance learner engagement and content retention in the classroom. Some simple ways to enhance creative thinking include allowing your learners to make simple choices and providing them with items to stimulate their imagination. Also, you can ask them open-ended questions to help them interrogate their understanding.
8. Travel Opportunities
Teaching is inherently an on-demand career, and educators have to adapt their instructional approaches to diverse learning styles and emerging educational trends.
Adaptability extends beyond the confines of the traditional classroom, offering educators unique opportunities for travel. Whether participating in professional development conferences, engaging in teacher exchange programs, or taking on international teaching assignments, educators often find themselves in diverse geographic settings.
Travel opportunities can also be enabled through the mobility of your teaching skills. Once certified, reciprocity agreements within states allow you to teach anywhere, including overseas.
Besides enjoying travel, you share your experiences with learners and help them be assimilated sucessfuly to an incredibly diverse world.
9. Commitment to Community
Teaching gives you the unique advantage of inspiring children and sharing your ideas with their families and the administration. You play a significant role in influencing the operations of the learners, their parents, and the community leadership. In addition, schools act as community hubs where people from different backgrounds meet to discuss their children’s specific needs and neighborhoods.
Your role as a teacher in molding children’s character and teaching ethics and values impacts future citizens’ quality. Such values include self-discipline, collaboration, empathy, honesty, and compassion.
10. Making a Difference
Few careers allow you to make a tangible difference in the lives of others. As a teacher, you are the most trusted source of advice for your learners in making important decisions.
You make a difference by inspiring and empowering students to reach their full potential, providing not only academic knowledge but also instilling essential life skills and fostering a love for learning.
Through your guidance and mentorship, you play a crucial role in shaping students’ character, instilling values, and promoting a sense of responsibility and community engagement.
Your impact extends far beyond the classroom, influencing the future trajectory of individuals and contributing to the overall betterment of society.
Before You Become a Teacher
As we’ve seen, teaching is a great career, with lots of perks and benefits. However, there a few downsides you need to look out for as you pursue your teaching career.
These include:
1. Some Districts Don’t Pay Breaks
The absence of paid breaks in some districts can significantly impact teacher both financially and professionally. You can get additional financial strain even as you rest during your summer breaks.
Some school districts help you manage the unpaid months through two saving schedules that pay in the summer.
For example, school districts require you to designate a specific amount to be deducted from your paycheck throughout the year and deposited in an account where it earns interest. Over the summer holiday, the savings are deposited directly into your regular paycheck account.
Other public school districts offer you the option of spreading your salary over 12 months instead of just the ones you are in school. With this option, your annual teacher salary doesn’t change; the amount in each paycheck changes.
If your school district doesn’t have any of these plans, budgeting properly is key in cushioning your finances for months without paychecks.
Consider a seasonal job to gain supplemental income during summer breaks and a year-round schedule.
2. Limited Budgets
Limited budgets can be experienced in both public and independent schools. If you teach in a school with limited funds, you may have to attend to more learners than teachers in well-funded schools.
Despite your passion for each learner’s success, you may not give learners the attention they need in an overcrowded classroom.
School-limited budgets also slash allocated funds for up-to-date technology, art supplies, transportation, and extra-curricular activities.
Lack of technology can limit your use of creative and innovative teaching strategies, compromising the quality of teaching that you are giving your learners.
3. Lower Salaries Compared to Other Professions
Compared to other college graduates such as accountants, reporters, registered nurses, computer programmers, teachers earn 23.3% lower.
Low wages result in compromised teacher retention, affecting the quality of learning. In addition, the reluctance of many college students to take education degrees results in increased teacher shortages, translating to higher workloads for those already in the profession.
However, many states are putting measures and legislation in place to increase teacher pay and other incentives to improve teacher retention.
4. Unmotivated Students
Unmotivated learners lack the desire to achieve, which is a significant barrier to realizing the desired learning outcomes.They may just do the bare minimum in the class, just enough to get by but not to enhance their learning.
When working with unmotivated learners, you face the challenge of changing their thinking to transition them to the belief that they can succeed in their academic tasks. You also have to figure out the root of their demotivation, the activities that motivate them in class, and how to incorporate them into their daily learning to grasp and retain their attention.
To your career, unmotivated learners may disengage other learners from their academics, affecting the entire learning environment and impacting the success of your teaching sessions.
Also, if your school district attaches some promotional or other benefits to the performance of your learners, such unmotivated learners may derail your chances of enjoying them due to poor performance.
5. Workload
Beides teaching, you’ll have other duties that require your time and effort. For instance, you may need to spend evenings setting, marking, and grading learner tests. You may also have learner progress records to update and administrative records to send.
When you can’t seem to get away from schoolwork, you may be overworked. Heavy workloads may lead to stress, decreased engagement, and burnout, affecting students’ learning outcomes.
It can also lead to reduced performance issues such as slower task completion, slips, lapses, and mistakes. You’ll need to balance your workload to avoid being overwhelmed.
You may create a schedule for completing your work depending on priority and urgency while limiting how much you do outside of work hours to ensure an effective work-life balance.
6. Student Performance Evaluation
In many institutions, school districts, and states, learner scores are highly prioritized for teacher performance. Since evaluations use learner scores in standardized tests, you may feel limited in the instructional methods you use for your learners.
Additionally, excessive focus on standardized evaluations and testing may lead to narrow curriculum implementation that limits learner creativity, discouraging exploration and realization of essential skills and competencies.
Learner test scores are influenced by learner school attendance, home environment, student health, and community factors. Therefore, using standardized tests to measure teacher performance may result in frustrations and excessive focus on teaching the test at the expense of other competencies and values.
Is Teaching the Right Choice for You?
Being a teacher demands more than teaching learners in your subject area or managing a rowdy classroom. You need a strong sense of empathy, patience, and listening skills. You also need to allow yourself to learn from your students and establish a solid bond of friendship and understanding.
Being a teacher means that you are in charge of molding and shaping learners’ minds, inspiring them to become the best version of themselves for a successful future.
Here are a couple of factors to consider as to evaluate if teaching is right for you:
- Passion for teaching: How passionate you are significantly contributes to your learner’s success. Teaching demands you use creative ways to interest your learners and create a caring and safe learning environment. You can only push your learners to realize their full potential when you are passionate and dedicated to your teaching career.
- Your motivation to become a teacher: Although teaching has some challenges, your motivation to inspire and transform the lives of children should be more. For example, your motivation should go beyond the paycheck and the summer breaks.
- Patience level: Patience is necessary when interacting with your learners’ parents and colleagues and managing a rowdy class. When you are patient, you understand what learners are going through, placing you at a vantage point to help them navigate their struggles effectively.
- Combining structure and flexibility: A clear structure is significant in enhancing effective communication in your classroom. When learners have clearly defined deadlines, rules, and expectations they get a definite understanding of what they need to comprehend in class. Flexibility in the classroom will help you adjust your teaching to the needs of every learner, enhancing their outcomes.
- Long working days: Teaching may demand more than just the working hours from your day. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, 30 percent of teachers took work home on a given day, compared to 20 percent of workers in other full-time professions. Most after-school roles have no direct impact on student learning, such as sending and replying to emails, grading papers, analyzing learner progress, and updating their parents. To be a teacher, then, you should be ready to work for more time than your regular school hours.
- Engaging and motivating students: As an educator, you must engage and motivate your learners to take the initiative and be responsible for their education. By encouraging them, learners will show characteristics of being goal-oriented, curious, willing to try, and will focus on higher achievement.
Become a Teacher and Enjoy All the Benefits
A teaching job offers you a variety of benefits, including job security and an opportunity for life-long learning. However, understanding all the job pertains, and the challenges you are likely to encounter is essential in helping you make the right decision towards a career in education.
To become a teacher means to become the backbone of our society. You become a role model, dedicating your life to guiding and molding learners for successful integration into adulthood and society.
If you are passionate about children and want to make a difference in the lives of children, enroll now and begin your teaching career.
At Teachers of Tomorrow we have produced over 80,000 teachers in the last 18 years through the alternative teacher certification program.
Do you have a bachelor’s degree in a non-education field? Get started today and begin teaching in less than a year.
