She doesn't have a clue!

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Amazing..........

Any teachers who read this, please correct me if I am wrong.....
Teachers also have excellent medical benefits, a union, and public employee retirement benefits with a low years in service limit. All the nurses I know couldn't feed a large dog on their monthly retirement income.

Just a note..teachers, low pay? SHOOT they get the summer off !!!! Besides that in this state the teachers make MORE than the regular RN ! Stress is however likened to pain I suppose....maybe you should use the pain scale on your neighbor......" well let's see now. You have stress? On a scale of one to ten......" LMAO

I am a teacher. It is stressful. Yes, we get summers off, and that is wonderful, and we honestly need the break from kids (parents too, and all that goes with it) But it's not all that great! I am leaving teaching to become a nurse. Why?
Well, teaching for me is not very challenging. I don't think teachers aren't intelligent, but for me it's not challenging. You pretty much know what is going to happen every hour of every day. The spontaniety and fast paced nursing environment would be more of a challenge for me. I would like to be able to work my shift (I know sometimes it gets stretched in nursing), and not have to go home and do hours of prep. The pay is O.K., but we are on salary, and I would like to get paid by the hour, and would like to get a decent pay increase. I get about 400 more each year! The biggest reason why I am getting out of teaching is the huge range of opportunities I will have with nursing. I am very limited as to what I can do. I can each 7 different grades (K-6), but most schools are set up the same. Can you even tell me how many different nursing opportunities I will have?
All in all, I am not happy with teaching, but there are many people who say they wouldn't dream of doing anything else. ( I think I've heard the same thing from nurses!) I can say for sure that you have to be a special kind of person to be a nurse, or to be a teacher. I hope to be a passionate nurse someday, like I see others around me who are passionate teachers.

Actually, I think the stressors of teaching and nursing are similar! As many of you know, I work in a school doing drug prevention and here are some of the similarities I see:

Both female dominated with males moving up on the food chain more quickly.

Both are jobs women SOMETIMES use between college and having babies and because sometimes the women use the profession as a temporary stop, they get treated like a temporary condition (that is, ignored).

Both are held accountable for outcomes they cannot entirely control. The QA process in education consists largely of telling teachers that they must "find a way" to teach every child. I tell teachers all the time that when I was in nursing school that we were told not to try to teach people who are in pain and many of these kids are--not physical pain, but psycho-emotional pain. Some are stressing over chemical abusing parents, their parents divorces, family upheaval, older sibs pregnancies and other dramas, chaos in the household, absent parents due to shift work and other problems, language barriers and having to be the family interpreter. In some cases, it is simply a matter of "you can lead a horse to water, but ya can't make 'em drink."

Both are expected to take an awful lot of c*** from the public and keep smiling. It isn't easy to keep smiling when an uneducated person tells you that you don't even know what you are doing.

Both do an essential life-saving service BUT if people don't take advantage of what is offered, it can harm their entire life outcomes. If you doubt that, look at the correlations between poor school performance, juvenile delinquency and crime. Teachers sometimes feel more distress over a high school students refusal to participate in the educational process than students themselves.

In both professions, it takes a large numbers of professionals to deliver the product (health care, education) and their is very little "status" to go around.

Lots of responsibility, little power.

Teachers carry a huge burden of the need to do preps every or many nights and grade papers. (And students expect to be amused, so they have to be "on" all of the time when they present.) Nurses carry the burden of weekends, nights and holidays. We take verbal and literal sh**. Administrators expect us the be "on," too. PR is god over all.

I agree with nurse s when she says teaching is not challenging. I know teachers that love it and they love it every day and they would be scandalized to see that in print. But for me, when I go into the classroom and say my drug prevention speech to a class room of 8th graders who don't want to hear it--5 times in a row I say the same thing!!!!--it is simply, "Stick a fork in me, I am done!" (Part of my boredom with my speech is that it is highly scripted and doesn't allow me to address some patent truths, like teens will drink. But "research" shows that least harm interventions "are not effective"... And this is?)

Don't bang on our colleagues in teaching. They made a choice; we made a choice. Teaching just wouldn't be enough for the "adrenalin junkie" in me, but I am really grateful for the great teachers in my son's life who are willing to do preps and grade papers, even though in slices into their lives.

The last time I got a raise, and I waited 2 years for this raise; it added up to 250.00 for the year. No I was not being reprimanded...I was not on probation. We were simply having our yearly cutbacks.

I don't want to get into the whole teachers vs nurses riff I've seen on other boards. I would like to point out that in my state teachers make far more than nurses right out of school. In addition to the summer vacation they get large numbers of days off throughout the year. Also, they have the most powerful union in my state and an excellent retirement program.

Nursing has none of this. After 25 years, I left the private and non-profit sectors to take a government job. I did it for the excellent pension which I have just enough working years left to qualify for. Based on the retirement plans of my former employers, I'd be selling pencils and eating catfood in retirement without my current job. Health benefits at the hospitals I worked at were shockingly poor. And since I am in a new job, I am back to 2 weeks vacation. Sigh.

Nursing needs to look at teaching and demand the best of what they have done....increased pay, benefits, retirement and time off.

I find it interesting to see how bitter some nurses can get just at the mention of the word teacher. I think it has alot to do with the fact that teachers are a lot more empowered and united than nurses.

Additionally, many nurses want the world to know how bad they have it and that they are the REAL victims and nobody could possible understand how they suffer. Then, immediately after proclaiming her status as a member of the worlds most victimized profession, she turns and stabs the nurse next to her in the back.