We live in a world where everyone thinks they know a lot about teaching, because they’ve got school experience – as a student. Students rarely get a glimpse into the amount of work teachers do behind the scenes. As an estimate, my face to face teaching workload is probably about 20-25% of my total workload. So students, understandably, probably think we do about a quarter of the work we actually do.

Fast forward to when those students are adults and part of the mainstream adult culture and you get a lot of misguided views about how hard teaching is, both difficulty and workload-wise. We constantly here that we are lucky to work 9-3 jobs with 12 weeks holidays a year.

Of course, as soon as any of these people partner up with a teacher or become one themselves, these delusions are quickly shown up as false.

About 40-50% of teachers quit in the first five years, many of them because they had an unrealistic belief about how difficult teaching is.

Perhaps if the difficulty of teaching was more well-known we’d be more respected.