Being a teacher will be rewarding for more over intrinsically because I know that feeling I get when I am around children and how they cling on to me. “A national survey suggests that teachers as a group are satisfied with the profession, and their level of satisfaction has increased in the last 25 years” (Kauchak 5). I want to have that emotional feeling when I walk into my classroom and meet the students at the door and they give hugs and show love to the teacher. It will motivate me as a teacher to keep doing what I went to college for instead of giving up on myself and the students. Even though I will get emotional rewards, I will also get intellectual rewards. Intellectual rewards are a content area of study that I enjoy and get to share it with my students. It is the fact that “Learning more about the world a seeing students get excited about the same things we do are two of the intellectual rewards of teaching” (Kauchak 7).
Although I may be overwhelmed with the many intrinsic rewards there are great extrinsic rewards that I will have for teaching. Extrinsic rewards really didn’t attract my attention with teaching but it was moreover how it flows with my church schedule. The extrinsic rewards of teaching are job security, vacations, and annual salary. With Job security after certain period of time the teacher can develop tenure, meaning to be designed to attract good people and protect them from political pressure. Another extrinsic reward is the long summer vacations and the vacations we get when the students are out of school. Lastly, the annual salary as teacher can be up for debate depending on how much one makes a year but it is a decent salary.
Now that I have discussed all the rewards for teaching that I will face, I want to talk about the three different challenges. The first and most difficult challenge that I will face as a teacher is the complexities of classrooms. During class time I am obligated to make split second decisions and keep my classroom under control. I will have to deal with different characteristics of classrooms such as multidimensional, simultaneous, immediate, unpredictable, and public. All of these mentioned are events that will occur in the class whether rapidly or repeatedly and while all of that comes along there will always be someone evaluating me. That can be stressful and nerve racking because as you are trying to keep the classroom in order and teach, others are watching me as I perform.
The second challenge that I will face is the multiple roles that I will perform such as creating productive learning environments, working with parents and other caregivers, and collaborating with colleagues. It wouldn’t be a difficult role for me to create a productive learning environment because I always put that into practice now. In a learning environment, “students feel safe, both physically and emotionally, and the day to day routines- including the values, expectations, learning experiences, and both spoken and