| From: | Adam L <runeweaver@********.NET> |
|---|---|
| Subject: | [Quite OT] Rant - Teacher's Pay |
| Date: | Wed, 5 Aug 1998 16:33:19 -0400 |
>but salaries are set by supply and demand not the value of the job being
>performed. If it was the other way around then secretaries would be just
>about the highest paid people around (Try finding a well running office
>without a good one) and Athletes and Entertainers would make next to
>nothing.There are not many people who can play a sport well enough to be
>a professional so the ones who can make millions. There are thousands
>and thousands of people who can be teachers so they don't make that much.
>But how much do they make really? Well let's see the averahe job has 260
>work days a year -10 holidays -5 sick personal days -10 vacation days
>leaving 235 work days a year. In most school juristiction's there are
>about190 school days a year. The average work day for full time employees
>is 8hrs without a paid lunch. The average school day is 6.5 to 7 hours
>long but I'll call it the same cause there are papers to grade, reports
>to read and tests to make up after hours (call it 1.5 to 2.5 hrs a day).
>Plus I know the teachers typically have to work 1 week before and after
>the school yeas abnd possibly another 2 weeks in the summer for an
>adittional 20 days and I'll give them the bennefit of the doubt and say
>they don't have enough sick days to matter. That means the average
>teacher works 3 weeks less that the average person. In my home State of
>Massachusetts the average annual income in the state was around $28,000.
>Starting Pay for a teacher was $27,500, The highest paid teachers made
>$46,000 (more that 15yrs teaching plus a masters degree). It seems to me
>that they were being paid pretty well.
I'm afraid you have some serious misinformation about the teaching
profession, at least those teachers who are serious about their work. As
the son of a teacher I know that the hours you mention don't even *begin*
to scratch the tip of the iceburg. If a teacher actually only had to work
the hours you mentioned, you would be quite correct, but these are the
'official' hours. That doesn't cover the *many* hours that must be spent
outside the classroom working on lesson plans and talking to parents who
are having problems with their kids. I've had quite a few teachers the only
worked the hours that you mentioned and to be perfectly blunt, the
education that I recieved in that class was next to worthless. There is an
assumption on the part of many people in eduation that if you throw enough
premade worksheets at the kids, they will learn something from it, and
anyone who was been in school recently can tell you that this is plainly
false. *Some* people can learn this way, but the majority of people do not
learn as well in this environment then they would be able to in less
structered and more discussion oriented classroom. Having a less structured
class requires more time and effort on the part of the teachers and so is
often neglected. Maybe if we made it worthwhile for our teachers to make
education interesting we would have more people who thought getting an
education was *ok*, instead of having 'em out on the streets, abusing
childern/spouses/drugs and sucking up our (for our American audience) tax
money with welfare checks.
-AdamL (Drrakn)
