It's not harder than any other job, but it's harder than many. Teaching, especially in middle and high school, is not as technically difficult as say many developer roles, but it is far more difficult when it comes to organization, emotional resilience, multitasking, and managing people.
It requires you to not only keep 20+ twelve year olds from devolving into chaos, but to also teach them things many of them could care less about. Then, you need take into account the laws surrounding your choices both in and outside the school and your representation in front of administration and parents. In the age of cell phones any slip up will likely end up being online and possibly in the news.
Imagine, as a developer, if you every possible small mistake you made had the potential to find its way to Twitter or Reddit? What if you had to manage 20 different, but similar projects? You had to time your bathroom breaks because you can't go whenever you want. That your lunches were consumed with professional development sessions, emergency parent meetings, kids that need your help, etc... That every few months you had to meet with every single customer to give them an update and hear back how much your work is amazing or sucks? Oh, and you have to do it over a period of 10 hours sitting in a crappy hard plastic chair.
Put aside the fact that you have little agency to affect any real change, are potentially subject to verbal or even physical abuse you can do nothing about. Then there are the shootings...
Teaching is much harder than most jobs where you can stare at a monitor and post throwaways on Hackernews. Technically harder, no, it's not physics (unless you're teaching physics), but it's still a difficult field.
You must be from the US. If the old rule of Internet chat was that someone would (eventually) draw comparison to Adolf Hitler or German National Socialism period, then the new rule on HN is someone will raise the expectation of gun violence in the US.
Because, very sadly, it is now an epidemic in the US that has no workable solution in sight because of intransigence around a 233 year old constitutional amendment in a context of intense, media-led paranoia (perhaps creating a feedback loop). "Bowling for Columbine" is 22 years old now - I don't think there's been substantial progress any of the root causes Moore called out back then.
It requires you to not only keep 20+ twelve year olds from devolving into chaos, but to also teach them things many of them could care less about. Then, you need take into account the laws surrounding your choices both in and outside the school and your representation in front of administration and parents. In the age of cell phones any slip up will likely end up being online and possibly in the news.
Imagine, as a developer, if you every possible small mistake you made had the potential to find its way to Twitter or Reddit? What if you had to manage 20 different, but similar projects? You had to time your bathroom breaks because you can't go whenever you want. That your lunches were consumed with professional development sessions, emergency parent meetings, kids that need your help, etc... That every few months you had to meet with every single customer to give them an update and hear back how much your work is amazing or sucks? Oh, and you have to do it over a period of 10 hours sitting in a crappy hard plastic chair.
Put aside the fact that you have little agency to affect any real change, are potentially subject to verbal or even physical abuse you can do nothing about. Then there are the shootings...
Teaching is much harder than most jobs where you can stare at a monitor and post throwaways on Hackernews. Technically harder, no, it's not physics (unless you're teaching physics), but it's still a difficult field.