Why do I teach?

Today, my wife and I spent 5 hours in the car coming back from a concert in Texas. The concert was good, and it was great to see some friends while we were there. Apparently, we left a little too soon after the concert, because one of our friends worked her magic and got to talk with all the members of the band...but I'll save that for another post.
This post is about some of the conversation on that car ride home. As we often do, we eventually got around to talking about teaching and the state of education. As we talked, it occurred to me that my goals for each of my classes are actually very simple. In Geometry, I want them to develop reasoning and logic skills. In Algebra (especially Algebra 2) I want them to develop the ability to think algebraically. In one case, they should be developing concrete thought processes, and in the other, they should be developing their ability for abstract thought. We can break everything down to strands and standards individual concepts, but in the end, this is what I want them to learn. This is why I am there. This is why I teach.
Problem is, it also occurred to me that in very few cases are either of this things happening in these classes. My Geometry students cannot reason their way through a proof, most of of them cannot complete a simple logic puzzle, and I'm too busy teaching probability and odds to spend more than the bare minimum trying to help them develop their reasoning skills. My Algebra 2 students cannot even think abstract enough to be able to open their minds to the idea that i can be a letter AND a number, and when I try to explain that they need to be able to look at things in different ways using binary numbers, all they get out of it is that binary looks easy and we should do that for a grade.
Wow that was a crazy run-on sentence, but the point is this: Maybe for the first time, I was really able to get a strong grasp today of "Why I teach," or the reason for the classes I teach. But, when I start to think about whether this is being accomplished and what is actually in my power to try to fix it, it makes me think even more about "Why do I teach?"