To Teach, Or Not to Teach

1922

Teaching as a profession because of its traditional "gentility" is no longer. Today girls enter that profession because they have a genuine love for the work. Yet, despite the innumerable avenues that have been opened to women during the last few years, we still hear mothers advising their daughters to go in for teaching in preference to the more difficult jobs in other lines of work.

Teaching is not easy. The very principle of it makes it difficult. And in figuring out the advantages of choosing it as a career in preference to some other line of work for which the girl may have a natural talent, it is well to look at the other side of the seeming simplicity.

Children do not like to be taught. It is natural for them to love play and shun any influence that tends to curb this natural instinct. So that the premier difficulty the teacher finds is to get her class into the right frame of mind. Her own mind must be so constructed that she no more questions the value of what she is doing than a bird wonders if it is worth while to build a nest. She must possess enough lasting enthusiasm to make her pupils believe in the importance of education; to make them like what they naturally dislike.

Effort, self-control and love of learning are not universal human traits like receiving mail, dancing, skating and shopping. And yet it is this that the natural teacher must sell as her ware. To avoid the colorless existence of the drudge, the successful teacher must be endowed with a natural aptitude for this very technical line of work.

The long Summer vacation, the Saturdays off, the 9 to 3 hours all look attractive. Yet the other side of the picture ought to be taken into consideration. For it is the drudgery that comes from being forced into the wrong kind of work that frazzles out the nerves every year of some of our finest young women.

—Appleton Post-Crescent, Appleton, Wisconsin, January 3, 1922, page 12.