Teaching - A Vocation or A Profession?

Is teaching a vocation or a profession?

I just started an online course, Open Content Licensing for Educators, through WikiEducator. Interestingly, the first session begins with the question, "Is teaching a vocation or a profession?" Like so much of my learning journey, I seem to find more questions than answers. Some participants talked about the "call" to teaching, about the need for dedication and the express satisfaction one gets from teaching. Others talk of the hours of hard work that teaching requires and how lends itself to a profession.

As an undergraduate student, I had a number of teachers who made it look easy, as though it were as natural as breathing to simply walk into the room and start teaching. Although I am new to teaching, I can already see how wrong I have been and the amount of hard work that goes into planning and preparing content and lessons and in evaluating learners and ourselves to continuously create a better learning experience.

Do I think teaching is a vocation or a profession? While I think teaching requires a certain degree of dedication and there is definitely an aspect of satisfaction that comes from teaching, I don't know that I would define it as a vocation based on these criteria. I brought dedication to my work as a librarian and there is satisfaction in helping a patron find the answers they are searching for, so I don't believe this is isolated to just teaching. And I wonder if calling these types of work, vocations, removes a sense of professionalism from the job. If it creates an illusion of a "naturalness" to the act of teaching that somehow dismisses the hard work involved or excuses those who don't put in the hard work and are the "bad" teachers. The excellent teachers that I work with, that I watched teach so "naturally" in my undergraduate, work hard to be excellent by evaluating themselves, learning new techniques, and continually studying the practice of teaching and learning.