Confucius is a Big, Fat Liar!

Okay, the title of this posting might be a bit extreme, but I saw a quote attributed to the Chinese teacher, philosopher, and political theorist, Confucius (551-479 BC) which read:

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

And all I could think at the time: "He's a big, fat liar!"

Normally, I find most of Confucius's quotes inspirational, but I have a problem with this specific quote. It's abundantly clear that Confucius never worked as a high school teacher in an inner-city school. Because while I do love my job, I have never had to work as hard as I am working this year. People who are not educators probably won't understand this rather strange phenomenon but it is universally known that the second year of teaching is twice as hard as the first year. One would think that it should get easier and eventually (I hear) it does. But oddly enough, every veteran teacher that I speak with all say the same thing: the second year of teaching is infinitely harder than the first year. It's no wonder that "[n]early 50 percent of new teachers leave the profession within their first five years." (NCTAF.org).  I would estimate that I spend more than half of my days in my classroom being appalled, disgusted, frustrated, and disillusioned by the behavior of my students; not to mention my current deplorable passing rate of ~30%. So why do I keep going back? Because I genuinely love what I do. (Although, when I recently discovered that metastatic cancer is considered a disability and I could be sitting on my couch collecting a check from the government, I did think "hmmmmm.")

Therefore, with all due respect to Confucius and while I thank him for his many words of wisdom, I cannot actually say that the above quote is accurate. 

I do like this quote!