Answer to a Question Posed on Ratemyprofessor.com

One time when I was checking my ratings on Ratemyprofessor.com (hush, you know we all do it), I discovered that a student had asked me a question: "Why are you teacher if you hate students?" (sic).

"Well, bugger," I thought to myself. "I thought I was doing such a swell job of hiding it."

Unfortunately, the little prick never came back to class after that. (Of course I know which one it was), or I'd have told him. I was raised to believe that you work because you like living indoors and eating food that you didn't scrounge out of a dumpster. If you get any measure of satisfaction out of what you do, that's an un-looked-for bonus.

Seriously, though: why is it that the moment a teacher expresses any dissatisfaction with his or her job, someone chimes in to say, "If you don't like it, do something else!" (Edited to add: I didn't say in class that I hated students. I said that I hated being asked "Why did you take off this point?" fifty bazillion times a day, and that I was likely to throttle the next person who asked.) Are teachers the only people in the world who sometimes find one aspect or another of their jobs to be, shall we say, less than thrilling? Of course not. Every job requires you to sometimes do things you don't want to do, and interact with people you'd cross the street to avoid if you had the choice. But teachers, apparently, are expected to enjoy every second of their jobs.

Well, except marking papers. In recent years, it's become acceptable for teachers to gripe about marking papers, especially since most lay-people think (when they think about it at all) that computers will soon be doing all of our marking for us. And I guess we can dislike prep, too, since most people have no idea we actually plan out ahead of time what we're going to do during the class day. (Our Dean of Students, for example, when she sees me working at an unusual hour will ask, "Staying late to grade papers?" I usually just say, "Yeah," because if I say, "No, I'm doing some prep," I'll have to spend thirty or forty-five valuable seconds explaining what that is.)

But anything that involves actually being in the same room with the students? If you don't love every second of that, you should quit! If you don't love having students wander in late with their cell phones going off, cheating blatantly on exams, lying about their dead grandmothers, ignoring your instructions and then asking about something you just said--if any of those things bother you, then quit! Just do something else! If having students do the minimum possible amount of work all semester, then ask for extra credit the day of the final, or having them interrogate you--in the middle of a lesson-about every point you took off of their paper, or tell you that they didn't do the assignment because they 'only do the important things'--if any of that frustrates you, rather than filling you with a passion to bring englightenment to the little dears' minds--then you should quit!

The same goes for structural inequalities and injustices. If you don't like having no health insurance, making less money than a manager at Burger King, and reporting to a Dean who knows less about teaching than the average factory worker, well, nobody put a gun to your head and made you go to graduate school, did they?

Do people think through the ramifications of what they're saying? Do they realize that if every teacher who ever experiences job dissatisfaction just quit, no one would last more than week in the profession? Or does "Just quit" really mean "Just shut up"?