ABSTRACT
It is an American shibboleth that teaching is a ‘rewarding’ (read personally satisfying) profession. However, a two-year study of middle and high school teachers gives reason to distrust the truth of this long-time truism (Ashton, Webb and Doda, 1983). Ethnographic analysis of observation data gathered in ten public school classrooms and interviews with more than forty teachers suggest that teaching is no longer the satisfying profession it once may have been. In fact, teaching has become a profession in crisis.
