To be a good teacher isn't easy. To be a great teacher is really hard. My wife loves teaching, it but it's like loving a good glass of cold water but instead getting a firehose in the face.
Hours are long - my wife leaves for work @ 5:30, gets home 12 hours later with a few hours of work to do before turning in - unless there's a night meeting, which can keep her as late at 9 or 10pm. No time for bathroom during her workday, so she never drinks anything - on a lot of days she also doesn't have time for lunch. I pack it and I end up throwing away a lot of sandwiches. If I need to reach her, quickly, an email or text won't work - she doesn't have time to check that stuff. I might as well send a smoke signal.
That's the work week. On a typical weekend, she's got 15 or 20 hours of work to clear, sometimes more. Right now, it's after 8pm on a saturday and she's working through a big pile of papers on her lap. She's been working off and on since 6:30 this morning. Aside from all the lesson planning & grading there's always a mountain of other stuff to do first. She might have 15 or 20 letters of rec to write on a given weekend. A bad teacher could mail it in and make them all the same, but she knows these kids are trying to get into a good college or get a scholarship. The letters need to be good, so she works hard on each one. Again, to be a good teacher isn't easy.
And there are the curveballs. On one recent Sunday night an essay a student wrote led her to believe the student was going to take his life. She called the mother, who was distraught (my wife could not reach any administrator or guidance counselor.) The mom had seen signs too, and that night she sent the kids to an inpatient program. The crying mom told my wife that she might have helped saved the kid's life. Maybe, all I know my wife was crying too and she still had a sh-t ton of papers to grade that night. She gets a lot from the career, but she sure gives. My wife could settle for being just a pretty good teacher and in many ways her life would be better or she could be a bad teacher & enjoy some good television at night. She's just not wired that way.