Did you ever leave a job because you just couldn't "take it" anymore?
Yes. Twice.
Both times I taught high school. There was and is a dissonance between good educational standards and societal perceptions of teaching and learning.
Movies depict romanticized, impassioned souls like John Keatinng in Dead Poets Society, who do exist, but like aquarium fish, not so common in the real world. Expecting the average teacher to be that is silly, and encouraging a false model of what an average classroom is and will be.
Rather than simply need to be imaginative, creative, intelligent, inspired, and diligent, teachers have to instead deal with incredible bureaucratic inertia, interference, and politics. Parents want excellence, but not at the cost of their child being unhappy or having to work too hard to earn it. A swath of society teaches that ALL objective evaluation is a) unnecessary, b) inaccurate, c) racist, and d) too politically damaging to mythical constructs of what education is. Then you have the growing segment of anti-educatitonal population who view school as a social exercise and value sports over learning.
The teacher is underpaid due to the legacy of being an extension of women's work historically, and because it happens outside the view of the public, especially the degree of prep work involved. Then the teacher becomes the target of zealous parents when the kids who've been lied to and coddled for 8-9 years hit high school and are not A-level but have been told they are by a system that encourages or forces busywork and low threshholds to prevent retention at grade levels based on performance.
Add to that the number of teachers who are not excellent, just taking a paycheck and doing the minimum or less as little more than hall monitors, then you have a system that is deteriorating rapidly and seeing increasing defection by the middle class. When those resources leave, the impoverished overpopulate the schools, and there is active hostility in the classroom to the learning, as it is work and seen as punishment by kids who believe they are being kept from important things like texting and videos and gaming and porn.
Add to all that the increased violence in students, including directed at staff, and you have a profession that professionals have stopped choosing.
I loved teaching in the few instances when I was allowed to do so in that environment. After I left it twice, some 13 years apart, I continued to teach adults in othter settings and enjoyed it immensely. I still enjoy children when around some of them, but the public system is engineered to fail, and it's not the schools' fault, but the society's.
