1    When Sakhalin Finnie was younger, her favorite subjects were math and science. She loved the subjects so much that she earned a college degree in engineering and spent years working as an engineer and making a nice salary. “At the time I was working as an engineer, I was also tutoring a lot of my coworkers’ children,” Finnie says. “I’d started a tutoring program with a teacher at my church, and I also taught a computer class to adults. I started to really enjoy teaching.” She enjoyed it so much that she switched careers.

2    Today, 10 years later, Finnie is a science teacher at Harbor Teacher Preparation Academy in Wilmington, Calif. She deals with 200 different personalities a day, works long hours, and makes far less money than she did as an engineer. But she’s not complaining. “For every kid that walks up and says, ‘I can read,’ ‘I am considering science,’ or ‘I really like your class,’ it is the best feeling in the world,” she says.

What Do Teachers Do?

3    You see teachers working every day. But how much do you know about their work?

4    Daily responsibilities include assigning and grading work, preparing lesson plans, keeping classes running smoothly, and enforcing disciplinary policies. They also attend parent-teacher conferences, continually assess how their students are learning, and communicate with their principals. They must be flexible to work with the many different personalities (and challenges) of students, fellow teachers, principals, other school staff, and parents.

5    Just as the duties of teachers vary, so do the settings in which they work. Educators work in private and public schools of all sizes and in all settings, from rural to suburban to urban. Teachers work in preschools, elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, colleges, and career and technical education (CTE) schools.

6    Depending on the school setting and grade level, some teachers teach all subjects to one classroom of students the whole day (common in elementary schools), while others teach a specific subject to many different classes. Although most people think of specific subjects such as math and science when they think of school, there are many other teaching options, e.g. the arts (music, dance, art, theater), vocational, business, physical education, special education, guidance counseling, and administrative positions in the school system.

What Does It Take to Be a Really Good Teacher?

7    Education and certification prepare a teacher for the classroom, but they’re not all it takes to make a good teacher. Certainly, a good teacher must have the knowledge base. However, a teacher must also be able to relate to students in the class and be able to relate what he or she is teaching to the experiences of the students.

8    Patience is necessary. “You have to be patient with students, parents, other teachers, administrators, and even yourself,” says Emily Kennedy, a 25-year-old math teacher at Alpharetta High School in Alpharetta, Ga. “Nothing will go perfectly the first time — or the hundredth — so you have to recognize the struggles you and your students are having will help you learn.”

9    Another must-have for a teacher’s tool kit is creativity. “I have to admit, I’m a little sick of reading Romeo and Juliet because I’ve read it 28 times,” says Roxanna Eiden, an English teacher at Hialeah Senior High School in Hialeah, Fla. So it’s important for teachers to get creative and mix things up to keep themselves and their students from getting bored, she says.

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1. At the time I was working as an engineer, I was also tutoring a lot of my coworkers’children ... 

我在做工程师的时候，也给很多同事的孩子辅导过功课…… 

本句中的 at the time 相当于 when。又如：

At the time they arrived, I was away. 

他们到达时我不在。

2. Just as the duties of teachers vary, so do the settings in which they work. 

教师的职责各有不同，他们工作的环境也同样不同。

在本句中，Just as…, so… 意思是“正像…一样也”，多用于正式文体。又如：

Just as we sweep our rooms, so we should sweep backward ideas from our minds. 

正如打扫房屋一样，我们也要扫除我们头脑中落后的东西。

Just as they put aside their prejudices, so we must be prepared to accept their good faith. 

正如他们必须抛弃成见一样，我们也必须准备接受他们的诚意。