For 6 hours a day, 9 months of the year of work?
The job, and the government propaganda imparted to mush minds, is simply just not worth that much money.....
If they even work that much. The school my grandsons go to which is in a highly desirable district seems to have 4 day school weeks constantly. If there happens to be a holiday, like this past MLK birthday, then it’s a 3 day week. They call these 1/2 and full days off teacher service days....whatever that means.
This really shouldn’t be that tough. A smart high school grad could teach the public school curriculum to students coming up.
Most of the educational claptrap that teachers learn getting their requisite teaching credentials isn’t really so—and thus sets them back as teachers from how that smart high school grad would approach things.
I work from 8 to 4. That’s 8 hours. I manage 80 pubescent, irascible balls of hormones.
BUT I DO GET THE SUMMER!
There may be some teachers who work 6 hour days, 9 months a year, but the good ones don’t. My wife does 12-16 hour days, every week day and usually 6-8 hours each day on the weekend. During “breaks” she spends hours grading assignments and writing report cards.
Her summer “break” starts about a week after the kids get out, after she’s spent hours cleaning her room, because the janitorial staff won’t. Then she spends weeks of the summer going to re-certification and training sessions. When that’s over, she gets to spend at least 2-3 days a week working with her “team teachers” to develop the curriculum for the next year. Then, for her, school starts 2-3 weeks before the kids come back, with training sessions on all the new laws and requirements — and all the whims of the merry-go-round administrators to learn about.
And that doesn’t begin to include the parents who believe their little Johnny could never do anything wrong, and he deserves straight “A” grades, even though he hasn’t turned in an assignment all quarter. Did I mention irate parents calling my unlisted home phone number at 2AM to scream obscenities at my wife?
And after 15 years as a teacher, she earns less than I did two years out of college as a computer programmer.
Oh, and did I mention she’s required, by law, to take 3 or more credits of continuing education at a college *EVERY YEAR*. And every three or four years, she has to go pay $500 and take two days of tests to keep her license. And, if she’s ever, ever let go from a job (even for a personality conflict or just because some administrator doesn’t like her shoe color) she can never get a job as a teacher again.
So, before you start throwing that crap out, ask yourself if you’d be willing to put up with 180 kids, for what works out to about $4 an hour with the time my wife puts in.
So, do I think that every teacher deserves $$$$? No, just the ones who work their ass off and get results like my wife does. For 10 straight years, her classes have shown the biggest improvement in math scores in the state of Colorado. Yet she gets the exact same salary schedule as the teacher who’s on his fifth sexual harassment investigation, and grades his students papers by giving them full points if they turned it in.
Him you can say that crap to. Not my wife.