The Good: It's a very rewarding profession. I taught English, and there was nothing better in the world than watching a kid's eyes light up as they understood something for the first time, or watching the class erupt in spontaneous discussion about a huge issue in a novel that none of them had ever considered. I don't mind them chattering away at each other if it's debating a contested point of a good story.
You do get good vacation time. It's not nearly the "three months paid vacation" that people think you get, but I've worked in fields where I was at work or on call during Christmas Day or Thanksgiving. You might have to take homework home, but you can still spend the time with family, and that's not nothing.
If you stick around long enough in one district, you can get paid reasonably decently. Add a master's or Ph.D. and it helps a lot. Usually the fringe benefits like health insurance or a retirement plan are fairly decent, depending on the state.
You will be doing continuing education the rest of your career, learning cool new tips and tricks and methods and strategies and books and ideas. And that's awesome, because it will keep you energized and ready to meet the needs of the students year after year.
You will work with amazing colleagues that will inspire you and give you awesome ideas for things to try with your students. They will lift you up when life gets sucky, and they will support you when you need help. You will make lifelong friends doing this job.
You will be constantly evolving how you do things, and gathering new skills and duties and ideas as educational policy changes. If you like a challenge, this is awesome.
The Bad: You'll be working 60-80 hours a week. Only 40 of that is paid, unless you're coaching, in which case, you'll be working 80-90 hours a week, only 50-60 of which is paid. You will be working on your vacation time. You will be working on your nights and weekends.
And you will still be behind, with people who will be angry at you for not getting things turned around fast enough. If you had a button that could stop time and turn things around to people in five minutes, they would still complain it wasn't fast enough. Such is life.
You will be doing continuing education the rest of your career, slogging through college credits that you don't really want to take, but need to in order to keep your licensure. And that sucks, because credits cost money and time, and sometimes you'll end up going to a conference you really didn't want to attend, but you had to take two days off and leave your students with a random substitute teacher that may or may not be counted upon to remotely follow your lesson plans.
You will get people that will resent you for getting "three months paid vacation" every summer, neglecting the fact that it is neither paid nor vacation, since you will be using that time to complete a lot of your professional development requirements or prep for the next year. Or you'll be teaching summer school because you need the money. If you get more than a week off in the summer, count your blessings. You will probably spend holidays with family, but while they're watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade, you're at the kitchen table grading 32 American Literature essays.
You will work with jaded, burnt out people who will show up at 7:30 and leave at 3:30, make exactly what you make (or more, depending on seniority,) have laminated lesson plans they've used for 30 years, and will sit in the teacher's lounge and grouse about everything while drinking bitter burnt coffee.
You will get new marching orders about how to do your job handed down roughly every six weeks, as Congress or state legislatures decide they want to do Common Core, no wait, Common Core is evil, no wait, we need more data! no wait... You will hear the phrase "we're flying the plane while we build it" more times than you can count. Even if you like a challenge, this is often frustrating and full of dead ends.
