SATIRE: Teachers Practice Valuable Skills Every Day

You may think teaching has to be one of the most useless jobs, but you would be wrong. Working with teenagers every single day offers numerous opportunities for honing valuable skills for when you want to move up to a better-paying job such as a toll-booth worker or clown.

For example, teachers practice the art of repetition every day. When one student asks, "When is this due?" it spurs an entire room full of teenagers to copy that student with the exact same question because either they cannot read the due date on the board or on their assignment, or they have gone deaf from cramming in ear buds and listening to One Direction's "Drag Me Down" on full blast. So teachers find themselves saying things like "Tomorrow," "At the end of the period," or "Never, I am just making you do it because I am evil" sixty times each class period.

Teachers learn how to write very specific and detailed directions to assignments and procedures. Never mind that these directions are rarely read by the students. What is most important is that teachers have mastered self-control by not stabbing themselves with their stapler repeatedly after receiving 50 papers emailed in a PDF format after the detailed directions explicitly stated to share the paper with the teacher in a Google Docs document.

One of the most valuable skills is the new vocabulary that teachers acquire while teaching high school. For example, "nomophobia" is a term for someone who fears being away from their mobile phone. Teachers learn this when they try to take away a student's phone and the student cries, "Noooo! I have nomophobia! I will diiiiiiiiiie!"

Many of the other words teachers learn are not appropriate to share here, but come in handy when they want to seem hip with their peers while out bowling on a Saturday night.

So perhaps you will rethink the teaching profession as completely useless. Yes, it does pay worse than toll-booth workers, clowns, animal breeders, bingo managers, and dog walkers, but the rewards teachers reap from working every day with sarcastic teenagers is priceless.