Inner city LA. My advice is that it depends on your constitution. Your friends nail the main problem for most of us. The struggle between management (Admins, testing, unfunded mandates) and serving kids. If somehow you don't feel any heat from those forces then maybe you would be ok. Things have changed a great deal even during my time on the job. We have become more and more personally responsible for failures that are largely caused by poverty. The press is down on us, the citizens hate us, more and more high stakes tests that threaten to impact our wages and our ongoing employment, less and less control of curriculum and delivery (unless you are brave and defiant). On the other hand, the kids need us and we provide for them. Some of us defy when and where we can, to deliver what kids really need, not just what the state says. Some of us become so attached to helping that it is hard to give up. That said, if I could do it over, and knowing what I know now, I wouldn't. It isn't worth it. The gains are too small even with heroic effort, and one person's ill considered change can undo months of careful (unpaid for) work. I work 12 hours a day, I get paid for 7 of them. I generally work all but 2 weeks of my vacation time (unpaid). I pay for all kinds of supplies out of pocket. I know what I produce in and for kids, but am told that I am a failure on a regular basis. In fact, though I am only mid career (and BTW I returned to teaching at 35), I am looking for an exit strategy. The kids need me, which makes it a tough decision, but the stresses are too high, the rewards virtually non-existent.
I came with the thought that being smart, motivated, and concerned was enough. I've learned a lot: the problem is all of us, and without solving the problems that kids arrive at school with (poverty, two parents working four jobs, no parents at all, very little guidance, street life, etc.), we won't make much of a dent in academic deficiency.
Here in LA, private school is easier, classes much smaller with much greater support in every way, but they pay a lot less.
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