I Thought I Knew What Teachers Did. Then I Became One.
It seems that almost everyone has an opinion about teaching.
In some ways, that makes sense. Most of us spent years in classrooms. We watched teachers teach, we completed assignments, we took tests, we waited for the bell to ring, and we all probably formed opinions about which teachers were good and which ones were not. So by the time we leave school, we have spent thousands of hours observing teachers at work.
This familiarity can create the impression that we understand what teaching involves. I probably thought I understood it too before I became a teacher. But after more than 25 years in the classroom, I have learned that experiencing school as a student is very different from being responsible for what happens inside a classroom.
What students see is important, but it is only part of the job. A lesson that lasts 45 minutes may have required planning, preparation, gathering materials, adapting instruction, and decisions about how students will demonstrate what they have learned. And when that lesson ends, the work associated with it often does not. That is one of the things I wish more people understood about teaching. Much of teaching happens in plain sight. Much of the real work of teaching does not.
The Work You Do Not See
From the outside, teaching can appear to be a job that begins when students arrive at 8AM and ends when the final bell rings at 3 PM. Students come to school, teachers deliver lessons, and everyone goes home at the end of the day. I understand how this can create the impression that most of a teacher’s work takes place during school hours. However, much of the planning, preparation, assessment, and other responsibilities associated with teaching happen outside the time students spend in the classroom. But the hours students, parents, and others see are only part of the work.
Before a lesson reaches students, someone has to decide what they need to learn, determine how best to teach it, prepare materials, and think about how to assess whether they actually learned it. Afterward, there may be assignments to review, feedback to provide, families to contact, meetings to attend, and adjustments to make before teaching the lesson again.
And then there is the work happening while we are teaching.
A teacher may be explaining a concept while simultaneously noticing that one student is confused, another has stopped paying attention, someone else needs additional support, and an activity that worked well with one class is not working nearly as well with this one. We make decisions constantly, often without stopping to think about how many decisions we are making.
None of this is meant to suggest that teaching is uniquely difficult or that other professions do not have responsibilities people rarely see. Most do. What makes teaching somewhat different is that almost everyone has spent years watching teachers work. That familiarity can make the invisible parts of the profession particularly easy to overlook.
I learned just how much of the work was invisible fairly early in my career.
When the Work Follows You Home
Early in my teaching career, I learned quickly that the work did not end when students left the classroom. As a science teacher, I could have 150 to 170 students at a time. I wanted them to have meaningful laboratory experiences, and I also wanted to provide thoughtful feedback on their work. What I did not fully appreciate at first was how much time that would require outside of the school day.
A single lab assignment multiplied across that many students could mean stacks of lab reports waiting to be read and evaluated. I would take them home, work through as many as I could, and return to school the next morning ready to teach another full day. Then another set of assignments would eventually take their place. At the time, I did not question this very much. I thought it was simply what good teachers did. If students had taken the time to complete the work, I believed I owed them detailed feedback. There was value in that commitment, but I had not yet learned to distinguish between providing meaningful feedback and feeling that I had to respond extensively to everything students produced.
One experience from those early years still stands out to me. I had assigned my students an atom model project that I considered an important part of their learning. The projects needed to be evaluated, and that work extended into winter break. I can still remember spending part of New Year’s Day grading atom models.
I do not share that story because I want sympathy or because I believe teachers are the only professionals whose work follows them home. I share it because the students who returned to my classroom after winter break, their parents, and others outside the classroom would likely never have known that part of the story. They saw the completed project, the grade, and the feedback, but not the hours of work that went into evaluating it.
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That is part of the invisible work of teaching.
Experience Changed How I Thought About the Work
It took me time to realize that the answer to having more work than I could reasonably complete was not simply to work more. Earlier in my career, I often measured my effectiveness by how much effort I was putting into everything. I wanted every lesson to be well planned, every assignment carefully reviewed, and every student to receive meaningful feedback. Those are worthwhile goals, but trying to give everything the same amount of time and attention was not sustainable.
Experience taught me to ask different questions. Does every assignment need detailed written feedback? Does every lesson need to be completely redesigned? Is the additional hour I am spending on something actually going to make a meaningful difference for my students?
Those questions did not cause me to care less about the quality of my teaching. They helped me become more intentional about where I placed my energy.
I still believe students deserve thoughtful lessons and meaningful feedback. But I have learned that meaningful does not always mean more. Sometimes a brief conversation with a student is more useful than several sentences written on an assignment. Sometimes a lesson that has worked well for years does not need to be redesigned simply because I feel that I should be doing something new. And sometimes the work that is still sitting on my desk can wait until tomorrow.That perspective took years to develop.
Perhaps that is another part of teaching that can be difficult to see from the outside. Experience in the classroom is not simply about becoming more knowledgeable about the subject you teach. It is also about learning how to make hundreds of decisions about where your attention matters most, what your students need from you, and what you can let go.
Understanding Teaching From Different Perspectives
I do not believe that teachers are the only people who have something valuable to say about education. Students experience our classrooms in ways we sometimes overlook. Parents know their children in ways we never will, and their observations can help us better understand and support the students we teach. These perspectives matter, and I have learned a great deal from listening to them throughout my career.
However, there is a difference between having an informed opinion about education and understanding everything involved in the work of teaching. A parent may have legitimate concerns about an assignment or a classroom experience without knowing all the instructional decisions that went into it. A former student may remember a particular teaching method as effective without recognizing the planning, adjustments, and classroom management that made it work.
Even as an experienced educator, I recognize that I do not fully understand every aspect of another teacher’s classroom. Different students, grade levels, subjects, and school environments create different demands. What works well in my science classroom may not work the same way in an elementary classroom or a high school English class.
That is why I believe conversations about teaching should begin with curiosity rather than assumptions. We do not have to agree on every educational decision, but we can recognize that there is often more happening than what we see from our individual perspectives.
What We See and What We Don’t
Every profession includes work that people outside of it may never see. Teaching is no different. What makes teaching somewhat unusual is that nearly everyone has spent years observing the profession from the other side of the classroom.
We remember our teachers. We remember the assignments they gave us, the rules they enforced, the grades we received, and how we felt in their classrooms. Those experiences shape how we think about education, and they should. But they do not tell the whole story.
After more than 25 years in the classroom, I am still learning what it means to teach well. I still have lessons that do not go as planned, students whose needs require me to adjust my approach, and moments when I rethink something I have done for years. Good teachers are still learning, too.
So when we talk about what teachers should be doing, what they should be doing differently, or what appears easy from the outside, perhaps we can begin with a little more curiosity and fewer assumptions.
I thought I knew what teachers did because I had spent years watching them. Then I became one. More than 25 years later, I am still discovering how much of this profession happens where no one else can see it.
