My wife teaches elementary school ESL and Spanish as needed. The school day is 8 hours of solid work, plus 2 hours of grading and two hours of planning. The mi

My wife teaches elementary school ESL and Spanish as needed. The school day is 8 hours of solid work, plus 2 hours of grading and two hours of planning. The minimum number of hours for most teachers is 60 hours, plus extra time for maybe coaching, or being and advisor for an extra-curricular (which are a dying bread of program in many schools). This is for doing the same thing you do year after year. Changes in academic guidelines, school policies, textbooks, academic fashion, technology and student aptitude variance from year to year force you to re-invent everything, every year. It's a horrible job not because teaching is horrible, but because we've turned our schools into the intersection of social engineering and politics. For every child there's at least one highly protective parent, with some political hot button. It's just a nightmare. For example, my wife teaches ESL and Spanish and had to go to meetings with a parent that thought her class was part of a "critical race theory" conspiracy. Another parent wanted my wife to teach Spanish without gender in the language. Still another was upset about having first graders sing, because the kinds might be "too judgey."