By "One of the Them"

Excerpted from The World's Work Magazine November 1909. This is an opinion piece by an American teacher, who worked in a state with the second highest pay and who claimed that low salaries were the least of the problem. Marion would not have agreed.

Why we hate our work and why we are ashamed of our profession.

I have known but three teachers, beginners excepted, who have genuinely liked their work. Among the real causes of this state of feeling, come the difficulties of securing and holding a position.  A young, highly-certified, enthusiastic graduate, who has no family or political or Masonic or religious pulls, has a heart-numbing task in front of her of securing a position. On the other hand, the teacher who has acquired nerves and wrinkles in the service has a harder fight. For her lies only the hope of getting into some larger city, but the positions in one of the cities means pull.

…

Even if a teacher does not have an rebellious evil-thinking crowd to manage, and so escapes the constant tenseness that kills, there is more or less police work to do. The requirements of discipline alone call for a combination of self-control, firmness, justice, moderation, patience, and sense of humour as if rarely found, but is always expected, by the pupil and the public…There are other things that make the work distasteful, such as the necessity of instilling the simplest fundamentals of etiquette, or the queer notions that school boards have of economy. Then there is a need for accommodating the pace of the class to the needs of the mediocre.  But the greatest cause of our hate is the horrid suspicion which often attacks us that the knowledge that we labor to impart is not worth the trouble.  Teachers in the lower grades are free of this. How many of have faced a student protesting: "I don't see what good it does me to learn this. I'll forget it by next term."

The woman of the profession are as a rule of a much better quality than the men, whom they are inclined to despise. Still, they must work under these men; indeed, they prefer that to working under other women, so they must submit to being directed and talked at by a masculine creature who is usually their inferior in mental endowment. (The men of better stuff soon get weeded out.) They must please these men who have the running of the machine.