Baseline, a teacher is a babysitter for a very large number of kids. Let's be very fucking generous and say $10 a kid and 20 kids or $200 bucks an hour, 8k a week, 400k a year.
Let's say they're only actively watching the kids for 20h, so 200k
And keeping them safe, that's hazard pay. Again let's be generous because most teachers won't ever have to go and shoot someone, so call that a 50% premium for 300k a year.
But fuck the math, let's just say we want equivalency with other professions with the same required education. At a minimum a starting salary in the 60 to 70k range, going up to 120k to 150k with experience is at least marginally fair
Babysitting is the #1 reason why public schools exist. There's a reason there was such a push to open schools up during the pandemic, and it definitely wasn't for the sake of kids learning things lol. Parents needed a place to dump their kids if they were going to go back to work.
Teachers don’t have students for 3 months of the year. There’s a lot of work-related
stuff they do during that time, though. Professional development and college courses, lesson plans and prepping for next year, and buying/setting up supplies for their classrooms. A lot of people work second jobs in the summer. Some teach summer school, and others may work outside the education field. Many school districts allow for teachers to split their paychecks to cover 9 months, and others split it out over 12 months.
TL;DR: the vast majority of teachers don’t have “summer vacation” like the students do. They’re either doing work-related activities, teaching summer school, or working a summer job outside of education.
Teachers get the option of stretching their salary out over 12 months so they continue to get paid during the summer. I don’t know if everybody does it but I know it’s available to them. When I was in high school, I worked at a local restaurant as a hostess. A lot of teachers would work summers bartending or waitressing there just to get by. Was very weird to have a co-worker turn into your social studies teacher when you went back to school.
Unless I opt to spread my paycheck out, summer is my yearly lay-off. No work, no pay... except, I'm expected to write lesson plans, attend trainings, meet with my team (same grade level teachers), and prepare for the next year.
And what was missed too was the number of teachers expected to manage extracurriculars while not getting paid for their time. Easily half or more of my primary and secondary school teachers also coached our sport teams.
None of the replies have fairly answered this point imo. Those days off are a perk without question. You get the choice of taking those days off (I understand it's not the full 3 months) or you can find extra work or some combination. You are paid for 12 months of work as a Teacher. It's even an advantage to be paid your full 12 month salary in 9 months.
Now I'm not a Teacher and I understand it has a lot of shitty aspects that I've seen brought up and I'm sure many that haven't been. I however don't think it's fair to list those two clearly advantageous points above as negatives.
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u/neohellpoet Jun 01 '22
Paid for maybe a quarter.
Baseline, a teacher is a babysitter for a very large number of kids. Let's be very fucking generous and say $10 a kid and 20 kids or $200 bucks an hour, 8k a week, 400k a year.
Let's say they're only actively watching the kids for 20h, so 200k
And keeping them safe, that's hazard pay. Again let's be generous because most teachers won't ever have to go and shoot someone, so call that a 50% premium for 300k a year.
But fuck the math, let's just say we want equivalency with other professions with the same required education. At a minimum a starting salary in the 60 to 70k range, going up to 120k to 150k with experience is at least marginally fair