Education / Teaching thread
They won't be around long enough for that to matter. There's a reason most people that set foot onto this career path run screaming from it in less than three years.
As long as we refuse to address the underlying maladies with public education, you're not going to find people who want to do this. Certified. Uncertified. It won't matter.
I am certain that the profession played a big part in my Mom's death.
She spent many years teaching high school English, and in some especially challenging settings. She eventually left the classroom to become a school librarian at a middle school. Different title, younger students, many of the same challenges. Over the years, she was honest about how much worse behavioral issues had become and how little she felt supported by parents, administrators, and the local and state educational boards. She had friends leave the profession, to do absolutely anything else, out of utter burnout.
About four months before she made it to retirement, she suffered a stroke, followed by a series of smaller strokes and heart attacks while on life support. Against very long odds, she survived but spent the remaining four years of her life bedridden in a nursing facility.
When I hear people talk about how easy teachers have it and how much how free time they have, I think about my worn-out Mom talking to parents, making lesson plans, and grading papers and exams well into the night. Summers involved workshops, seminars, and various school obligations, but I wouldn't have blamed her if she just slept through June and July. Many of her colleagues worked second jobs to supplement their incomes so they could make ends meet.
The teachers who somehow still pour themselves into a profession that grinds people down, in a society that mostly couldn't care less, are actual everyday heroes. Given how important and defining education is, it shouldn't be a system that has to depend on the heroic efforts of unheralded and unsupported professionals.