Teaching in 2012 - Teachers...Is It Worth It? [View all]

[NeedleCast]

Greetings, my first time participating in this group.

I'd like to address the question in the title to teachers at any level who'd care to respond. My situation is this - I'm 38 years old and will be returning to school full time in Spring to pursue a BS degree in Biology. For the past 10 years, I've worked pretty successfully as a technical IT trainer (mostly software, some hardware). For the most part, it's been enjoyable but I'm losing interest in it and have hit a ceiling in terms of advancement.

Luckily I'm in a position thanks to having a wife that makes good money and GI bill benefits to return to school full time and finish my degree (I have about 30 hours of courses done before I joined the military). I've always been interested in the sciences and decided that if I were going to go back, it would be to get a degree in a field I'm interested in. My longer term goal is to finish my masters with a focus on botany or environmental conservation. After I finish my undergrad, I had considered teaching at a high school level while I finish my masters and have heard through friends that my city (Baltimore) has a shortage of qualified science teachers.

So that's that.

All that being said, I have few friends in the K-12 education field and most of them seem to hate their jobs, most commonly citing fights with school management over issues like actual education over being forced to teach for standardized testing and things like that. Baltimore is also a (maybe?) strange cosmos where our public schools are fairly horrible and anyone who can afford to do so sends their children to private schools - as a teacher, is there a notable difference in the quality of the job in a public vs private capacity?

I guess the bottom line question for me to those of your who are currently teach is -
A) Is it worth it
and
B) Would you enter the K-12 teaching field again if you got a do-over?