The Whipping-Boy Profession

Welcome to the career selection seminar. My task is to help you decide if the profession to which I have dedicated my life is right for you. What is it like being a daily practitioner of this ancient and venerable profession? Here are a few characteristics:

• You will need at least a Master's degree; in other words, you must find funding and support yourself through five or six years of college.
• You must demonstrate expertise in at least two disciplines.
• You must be willing to work during office hours and a number of additional unpaid hours, often through midnight. No labor laws protect you; it is required by the job that you work these extra free hours.
• For your efforts you will be paid less than a doctor, less even than the sanitation worker who hauls your garbage, less than any other profession, for sure.
• Every day, start to finish, you will deal with aggravating people. This is part of the core activity of your profession.
• You will be evaluated at least yearly, in part according to the subsequent behavior of the aggravating people.
• Your job does not involve political activity, yet you will find politics utterly inescapable.
• And at the last, you may be rewarded by being FIRED EN MASSE, with the explicit and astringent approval of the President of the United States of America.

If you think you might like to be a schoolteacher, first talk to your therapist about your unreasoning masochistic fantasies, then contact your nearest school of education.

(H/T Jane Hamsher.)