Not quite accurate.
My wife got into teaching for a brief period thinking it would be great pay-per-hour-worked.
She taught health sciences classes (electives intended to expose students to the medical field).
She found the opposite to be the case.
During her multi-year probationary period, she had at least one required meeting per week with her faculty mentor for which 30 minutes were unpaid due to being outside contract hours.
She also had at least one meeting per month with other "beginning" teachers 30 minutes of which were outside contract hours and unpaid.
There were the required weekly office hours amounting to 30 minutes unpaid per week.
Then there were the required weekly department meetings which added on another unpaid 30 minutes per week.
Then there was the required monthly faculty meeting costing her 30 minutes unpaid monthly.
Then there was a monthly countywide meeting which took at least two hours per month since the meetings were outside contract hours and she had to drive to a different school for the meetings (before the China virus).
She had a daily planning period but that would often be taken covering a class for which a substitute was unavailable.Such coverage was uncompensated.
She also had to perform unpaid student supervision. This could be before school, during lunch, after school, etc.
Once per semester she had to show up for several unpaid hours of "Meet the teacher" night.
Several times per semester she might be required to perform multiple hours of unpaid assistance for a variety of testing such as SAT, ACT, pre-SAT, pre-ACT, and others.
She had to be present and perform specific unpaid duties during the annual graduation ceremony. This was four unpaid hours per year.
She had to attend recruiting sessions at feeder middle schools once per year requiring at least 6 unpaid hours per year.
She was expected to be involved with the Health Sciences student organization including plan and accompany students on over-night field trips for which she only received mileage, meal and lodging compensation. This was at minimum 24 hours unpaid time per semester.
During the summer she had to attend training courses in a city 2 hours away. Depending on scheduling, this could burn an entire week for which her only compensation was course reimbursement, meals, lodging and mileage.
Now we get to time she actually spent preparing lessons for multiple different classes, grading assignments and communicating with parents. This was over-the-top. All her waking hours at home. The children and I had to take on her normal household functions during this time.
All of this and she had the ever present chance of an administrator randomly walking into her class to "evaluate" her performance. In the beginning it was about 5-6 random evaluations per year but finally became 3. After each random evaluation she had to sit with the administrator for at least 30 minutes unpaid and be told what she was doing wrong, no if's, and's or buts allowed by her.
She stayed at it 5 years while our two oldest passed through high school. Finally, she threw the towel in and went back to being a nurse.
She developed an intense hatred of voter initiatives to increase teacher pay since the system was so bloated with administrators, counselors, librarians, support staff, and many others who had not taught a class in decades yet whose pay was indexed to teacher pay.
Concur. Wife is a math teacher. Try teaching math to kids who don’t want to be there. They don’t do their assignments, lie, act out, skip class. They put more effort into getting out of doing the work than they would expend actually doing the work. And they’re surprised when they’re told they can’t do extracurricular activities because they’re failing the subject.
And I won’t go into how cliquey teachers are. Don’t be the new girl.