>>35023504
pls let me know if you try. i just started my teaching career and damn it looks bleak. i don't know what's more blackpilling: the children or coworkers/admin. probably the latter honestly. i remember when i student taught i got placed in one of the worst districts in my state and i had to teach these kids about ww1. the whole idea i was trying to get them to understand was that the weapons invented during the conflict created mass death on a scale never before seen, and my mentor was having none of it. i remember her pulling me aside after one lesson to tell me "you're trying to get these kids to learn what the weapons did, what they really should be learning is the weapons." and spent 10 minutes explaining to me how i should re model my lessons into just having these kids study the weapons and dates of the war and nothing more. there's the entire system for you, no deep learning whatsoever. i seriously wonder if what i'm doing is evil more times than i'd like.

i'm teaching special ed for the job security but wholly fuck i can't even remotely try to puit any intelligence in my lessons without admin nosing their way in and have me churn out surface-level garbage. i wish i could say it was only the retards who are retarded, but truth be told gen ed isn't better. no one can read. no one can do any deep thinking. teachers are all hopped up on caffeine and bitch in teacher's lounges. hopefully college would be a better place to teach but considering most of these students are gonna wind up there i somehow doubt it'll be much better. at least you'll paid for research, though.

>>35023504
It's brutally difficult, especially in the humanities. It's not that you need to be particularly brilliant to become a professor but that there's an unreal amount of competition. Academia is in a state of crisis and departments like history are getting hammered especially hard. State flagship schools are shutting down humanities programs all over the place, and elite schools are slashing non-STEM PhD cohorts down to only a few students. To get admitted anywhere decent you're going to have to compete with 300+ tryhards, some of whom are going to have connections to the admissions committee (in addition to masters degrees, research experience, publications etc). It needs to be a great (like top 20) school too because you absolutely are not getting an academic job in 2026 with anything less than that. After that you're going to need to do a postdoc, which are also competitive. It might be multiple postdocs. From there, good fucking luck getting a tenure track position. Again, you are going to have to battle with 300+ tryhard applicants except this time its for one position at University of Iowa. This is all happening while you're trapped in postdoc limbo earning bullshit pay and moving to a new city every few years for a new position. If you don't get extremely lucky and eventually land one of the tiny number of new professor slots nationwide in your subfield, you just quit and leave academia with a PhD no one really cares about and niche work experience.

Basically, don't do it unless you can get into a Harvard tier school. At the very least, read this before you consider it. Also understand that this was written in 2021. Everything issue described here has gotten much, much worse due to AI, declining undergrad enrollment, and Trump administration funding cuts.
https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-school-in-the-academic-humanities/comment-page-1/

>>35023504
A PhD is pretty much a prerequisite for a university job, though not always for a community college.

>>35023504
>I have a master's
Not gonna be easy. Some colleges will let you work as a grad lecturer or something but you will be expected to work on getting published on top of working towards your PhD and teaching your courses. All for what will likely be equal or less pay than your teaching job.