To Teach or Not To Teach: That is the Question!

I got a huge warm fuzzy from my 310 class this past week. I took over a portion of the lab my TA professor normally teaches while he attended another function - and when I came in the following week before he arrived - they all told me as a group how nice my portion of the lab was and that they'd heard such good things from the other lab section that I teach exclusively. Isn't that wonderful? :)

So here's the issues at hand in this decision....
- If I want to teach that's great but you don't really get paid to teach when you're a professor. You get paid to do research and for other things, not the teaching and advising. Those are just expected duties that you do as part of the job, but don't really get rewarded for.
- I love teaching, I hate bad teachers and know I make a good one.... but I am not sure I am capable enough at good research to achieve tenure as a professor. You WANT tenure, it's the ultimate goal of being a professor.
- It's less money salary-wise both at the outset and over time... but it's much more flexibility in every other area of your life. Choice in projects, classes, school you work at, wardrobe, schedule, etc. That's a definite trade-off. Plus I love learning, and staying in a school = getting paid to learn the rest of my life.
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