I'm a history teacher, teaching (mostly European) history to kids aged 12 to 15 - I guess that would be middle school in the US. I do enjoy my job - I think if you don't enjoy being a teacher, it's very hard to stay in the job - but it isn't entirely what I expected when I started out.

The thing is, I came from university knowing everything about 'how to do history' and having spent years studying one or two very specific subjects. I wanted to bring all this knowledge to these kids (I'm still a bit ashamed about my naiveté).

Truth is, these kids know nothing about history, and I'm only able to teach them the tiniest bit of what I know (the exact subject I spent 2 years studying was covered in 2 lines in the textbook). It was a shock to me when I first realised this, but I've gotten over it.

Furthermore, they don't (and neurologically developmentally can't yet) think like a trained historian does. It's possible to get them acquainted with the idea that what we know of history isn't the same as what exactly happened. It's a bit harder to get them used to the idea that there may be various interpretations of history (they like to deal in absolutes at this age). It's harder still to get them to understand that the way we live and our morals influence the various interpretations of history. Hard, but not impossible - they'll have to be guided through the thinking steps to make, and they have to be reminded about it over and over again. But I absolutely love it when I see that this 'clicks' with students.

I'm in graduate school, and I've had the opportunity to teach while working on my PhD. It's incredibly rewarding work - you get to find ways to take what you know and make it intelligible for others, and it's really exciting to see students make clear and measurable progress as the year goes on. Things like grading stacks of papers and exams can be exhausting, but the excitement of reading something a student has written that shows that they really get it - especially when they didn't at the beginning of the class - is very exciting. Teaching is great.

It's the stuff surrounding the teaching that sucks right now. In many countries (especially the US and the UK), universities are trying their hardest to squeeze the teaching budget as tightly as they can. That means that, in the US, many full-time teaching positions are being replaced with part-time contracts that pay little more than minimum wage per course, no health insurance, benefits, or sometimes even office space, and offer no job security. Search the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, Slate, or the Atlantic for articles about 'adjuncts', and you'll see the same story repeated again and again. It's a serious problem, makes it really rough for new PhDs trying to land a teaching job, and honestly threatens to destroy the American education system. (Things in the UK are following a similar track, from what I've been reading/hearing.)

It's not all bad news - there are still good jobs in academia. But there are many more PhDs competing for those jobs than there are openings. Almost everyone who gets a history PhD finds a good job once they've finished, but only half of these jobs are teaching college students - the rest of us will enter administration, government work, etc. Here's a recent study that shows where people who got their PhDs a few years ago ended up.

And there's a growing market for history majors who don't want to teach and don't go to grad school.

So I'd encourage you to pursue a history degree - but don't set your heart on teaching (at the college level, at least) at the other end. It's a very difficult job to land.

If you love the academia of History, teaching at younger grades might not suit you. Plus with being a teacher you do a hell of a lot more than just teaching History. I love my job but teaching actual History is like 35% of what I do. I would say you use History as a means to teach how to write and think. You pretty much become an English teacher and History is your medium.

I studied history and secondary education while I was an undergraduate. I taught middle and high school and substituted for a few years. I loved teaching, I loved interacting with students and I loved relating things that they don't care about to them and making them care.

That being said, I quit. The politics of teaching towards a test soured me on the profession and I really don't plan on ever going back.

I do not have an academic background in history, but had enjoyed it a side-interest in addition to my primary focus on science and art. Fresh out of college, I was asked to teach history and agreed, and I did enjoy it. If you enjoy teaching more than learning, then work with children. If you enjoy learning more than teaching, be a professor. It's essential with children that you are engaged and interested, and those types of people are born and not made in college.

Teach because you like teaching, not because you like history.

I'm currently a history/social studies teacher in a Washington, D.C. I can tell you right away that the school and type of students you work with make the biggest difference in whether you actually like the profession. Teaching is very rewarding, and I love that I get to spend all day talking about things that I find interesting, but as another comment said, you will alos become bores since the students have only a rudimentary grasp of historical content and almost no concept of methods and practices of historiography.

The good thing is that you'll know all the content, and that schools are moving towards an inquiry based approach to teaching, and there's no standardized tests (except APs and IB). The bad is that you'll often be bored by the subjects, not paid a ton, and will work with kids/parents/administrators you would rather not.

I would suggest that you look carefully into whether there are teacher shortages or surpluses in your area. I became a history teacher because I love history, and I'd be good at teaching it... if the schools actually wanted me to teach history. But I am not currently teaching, because I don't want to teach 6 different subjects when I'm only trained in two of them. No one is hiring history teachers in my area right now.

As other people in this thread have said, you also need to consider that there is MUCH, MUCH more to teaching than the subject matter. It involves a great deal of classroom management, and if you are not good at that then you won't even end up getting to the teaching part.

If you really enjoy history, but don't necessarily have a passion for being around young kids or teens, you might want to consider going to grad school and becoming a professor rather than a history teacher. If you love kids and think being in front of a class of 30 of them day in and day out is totally your jam, then go for it.

I teach History to 11-18 year olds in the UK. Having initially taught undergraduates at York, Teesside and the OU, I realised that I would never get tenure, or a "proper job" in teaching at university so I did a PGCE at Cambridge and became a History Teacher. I love teaching and I love History and I would argue that one can't be a good History Teacher unless you love both. I've worked with teachers who taught history and historians who taught history, and neither were more than adequate; neither really inspired the kids. To inspire you have to be both. The problem, to me, is the work load, and the ideological and political pressures. Each new government seeks to "improve" teaching, and tends to blame teachers for kids' underachievement. The marking and preparation uses up a lot of after-work time, and the actual practise of teaching is very tiring. Hence by the end of the week I am tired and my social life is limited. It is one of the reasons why teachers so often marry teachers is because there is a mutual understanding of the pressures So, although I have enjoyed teaching, and still enjoy teaching, there are drawbacks to the job that you need to be aware of.