You have entirely missed the point of my post.
It was not a complaint about my own situation. It was to point out the detached reality that teachers live in.
Everything in my post is dictated by market forces; the wage-level; the numbers of hours worked (full-year vs. 8 months), the lack of time off (the worst thing you can do is to not pull your weight; your co-workers will do you in long before your boss ever notices...).
The solution is not for me and everyone else to leave the marketplace and join the education bureaucracy, the solution is to bring market competition to education, and the postive pressures toward results that go with it.
Read my tagline...
Reagan80
Most non-teachers have a "detached reality" of what it is to be a teacher. They imagine a teacher sitting behind a desk with her feet propped up doing nothing for 6 hours a day, 190 days per year, while 30 happy children quietly do their work.
Teachers in well-to-do northeastern suburbs might make salaries near $100K, but most of us in the rest of the country don't. Many of us don't make half that.
I'd love to see market forces at work in education, however...those of us with science and math degrees would make a lot more money!