ABSTRACT
The purpose of this study was to understand what makes teaching interesting. To do this, we simply asked 22 teachers what they found satisfying, rewarding, or stimulating and what was dull, bland, or boring. The analysis of their answers was done in two ways: (1) the substantives of what they said and (2) the unique patterns of their thought processes. The findings of the first analysis were familiar: Kids are exciting and yard duty is tedious. The findings from the second were surprising: Their self-estimates of quality of work life clearly favoured those teachers whose ways of answering these questions showed them to be (a) more resourceful in describing teaching and (b) more articulate and aware of their own practical preferences, i.e., more professionally literate. These findings are encouraging for persons interested in teacher morale in that some previous studies carried out for different purposes have demonstrated that series of workshops may be deliberately designed to change those two variables.
