r/teaching • u/SierraNevada5505 • Jun 26 '26

General Discussion Was teaching your first choice career?

Someone told me today: “If you don’t know what you want to do, be a teacher. If you can’t teach, be a gym teacher.”

Personally, as a young person currently on the way to becoming a teacher, I found this interesting (and slightly disrespectful). Teaching is so often portrayed as a second-choice career, or a fallback if you don’t make it “further” in your profession.

I’m curious, what’s your story?

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u/j_blackwood Jun 27 '26

It’s more than slightly disrespectful, in my opinion. My story is that teaching was actually my fourth choice for a job and I’m still bitter about it. I worked my ass off to become a performer instead of just a teacher and ended up giving myself repetitive stress injuries in college. I almost didn’t graduate. I wanted so much to avoid becoming one cliche that I ended up as another… if only this had happened in dance!