I just speak from experience. My daughter puts in well more than a 40 hour week. She is a high school math teacher, who takes her profession seriously. You seem very touchy on this subject, as do so many others.
Other downsides to teaching:
-When she taught at an inner city school, she was physically assualted by a female student. She has since moved to another school district.
-She is MADE to pay $900 per year to be in a union, which has an agenda that goes (politically) against everything she stands for.
-Her salary is not that great, believe me. Factory workers make much more.
-Much of her summer is filled with lessons plans for the following year.
-She does not have time during the day to post on internet websites.
-Grading papers fills most of her evenings, so not much internet posting then either.
-She does not work HALF a year. Are you kidding? Summer vacations are getting shorter and shorter.
And these are only a few points. Which I'm sure will go right over your head.
I love this website, but homeschoolers are getting more radical all the time. And like I said before, seem to have PLENTY of free time to post their feelings.
Why is it we are supposed to feel sympathy for an utterly corrupt system because it has some good employees? Both of my grandmothers, my mother, and innumerable uncles, aunts, and cousins work for or have retired from the government school system. Therefore?
Teachers are not underpaid: http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_nypost_teacher_pay_myth.htm
While summers may be getting shorter, the number of days worked remains around 185 (including in-service days)
No one is attacking your daughter or teachers per se. The problem is the system: the model is the mistake. Pointing out that there are some conscientious and hard working school employees (and there certainly are) no more justifies the insanity of the system than pointing out that Soviet collective farms had some talented and hard working farmers would justify the Soviet model for agriculture.
She should not be paying $900 per year to a teachers' union so incompetent as to leave her with a lower salary than that of the factory-working taxpayers who are mercilessly farmed to pay her paycheck. Factories have no power to levy taxes. Of course, the likelihood of any claim that a single gummint skewel teacher in America makes less than a full-time factory worker is laughable on its face. We may have been born at night but it was not last night.
So, she prepares lesson plans in the summer (in a verrrrry stable subject like math). When she has completed her lesson plans competently, she will be enjoying her lengthy vacations.
She has to grade papers and homework and tests??? Well, those tasks are essential to her career and her students. If she does not like that aspect of her job, she should get one of those fat factory worker jobs.
If she taught in a private alternative school with Judaeo-Christian values instead of at a gummint skewel dedicated to secular leftist vaues, she would not find herself assaulted and she might even find her efforts at math appreciated.
180 days < 1/2 of 365 days. If she is a math teacher qualified to teach other than in gummint skewels she would understand that math. I would think that even gummint math teachers could handle that but maybe I am wrong about that.
Homeschoolers and those of us who are involved in alternative and rigorous private education seem more radical to you because of the increasing gap between competent education such as we offer and "progressive" gummint misedjamakashun (Dewey/Mann/etc.) which produces functional illiterates, innumerates and amoral monsters.
On the other hand, our students will govern your daughter's students so there is some hope.
We also educate at 1/3 or less of the typical cost of gummint misedjamakashun and produce a far superior result because we favor Saxon Math over polo ponies, Warriner's Grammar over yacht club experiences, actual science over Darwinism, morals over "fisting" ongoing good behavior as an ongoing condition of matriculation (enrollment for gummint misedjamakashunists in Rio Linda), actual music over MTV, actual art over the random product of an infinite number of monkeys (no, they are NOT our relatives mjuch less our ancestors) equipped with multiple oil paint tubes, William Wordsworth over beat poets like Allen Ginsberg, Shakespeare over Theater of the Absurd; English Grammar over ghetto patois; American history over Marxist and other "multicultural" propaganda; Theology over psychiatry; religion and morals over agnosticism or atheism and the amorality of "do as you please" as advocated by the late Antonio Gramsci.
Cinives is right. AND Free Republic is a no "boo-hoo" zone.
Parents would be sooooo pleasantly surprised at how much time they would have if they did not have to waste it arguing with gummint skewel "teachers" and administrators and other deaf public officials. Homeschoolers and alternative schoolers post their KNOWLEDGE and not mere feelings.
I think homeschoolers are just getting tired of being misrepresented and denigrated. And concerned that their rights as parents to educate their children might be taken away by power-hungry bureaucrats. If you consider that "radical," so it goes.
For someone to insinuate that I am unqualified to educate my kids is just ignorant. Two master's degrees (one in Education) should be evidence enough that I am qualified to homeschool my kids. And to casually dismiss homeschooling parents who aren't so formally educated is similarly ignorant.