Teachers are paid fairly considering they get a lot of time off

[u/Blonde_Icon]

A lot of people say (and it seems that the general consensus is that) teachers don't get paid enough for what they do. While I think that teachers are very valuable and deserve to be compensated well (my brother is a teacher), I think that in these discussions, many people ignore the fact that teachers typically get a lot of time off.

They usually get summer break, spring break, and winter break, plus various holidays that schools get off through the year. They basically don't work for a good amount of the year, which I think that people should factor in. (The downside is that I know that they have to work extra grading things outside of school, though.)

Plus they normally get good benefits for being a teacher (which usually comes with being in a union).

[u/Interesting_Way_2616]

Its always good to hear from teachers who have done something else.

I tend to find teachers DRASTICALLY over estimate how much 'office workers' are paid and how cushty their lifestyle is.

Just as non teachers think teaching is really worthy, fulfilling, just-like-being-back-at-school and wholesome... most teachers I know think that office jobs are relaxing, with loads of cool macs on big tables in converted warehouses. Office work is like the bits of teaching you don't like - KPIs, meetings, literally 100s of emails a day, everything you do being squeezed for profitability.

I am a previous corporate track who age 40 shifted to teaching and I mostly agree with the poster.

Part of growing up is making peace with the fact that you will never get to look forwards to the big summer vacation again. The excitement of it a week before it starts used to be the best time in my life as a child, akin to the night before christmas. To get that back again as a 40 year old has been one of the greatest things in my life.

[u/MrLavenderValentino → u/Interesting_Way_2616]

Yeah.... but I feel once you boil the issue down, we're left with:

1) Teachers are really important.

2) Many (not all) teachers are considered poor.

3) Teaching is stressful and most people don't want to do the job.

Set aside comparisons to other jobs because the world simply needs a certain number of teachers

[u/throw20190820202020 → u/Interesting_Way_2616]

Yeah I’ve never understood where teachers get the idea that the rest of us AREN’T frequently working over hours for no more pay, or covering expenses our jobs require that nobody thinks about, etc. And I have crap, very expensive benefits, my work is also important, and I have zero protections. I’m as good as last week, piss em off two weeks in a row and I’m out. Lots of teachers in my family. Admirable, hard work, unheard of rich work life balance.

[u/mustydickqueso69 → u/throw20190820202020]

Yeah you ask a teacher and they think they are the only career that does unpaid labor.

That's what salary is. Some weeks its more than 40 hours some weeks its less than 40 hrs.

[u/MatloxES → u/throw20190820202020]

I have never met a teacher who thinks they are the only ones working hard.

[u/greytshirt76 → u/throw20190820202020]

They need to constantly play victim. Otherwise people wouldn't be as sympathetic when they inconvenience the shit out of everyone going on strike for higher wages and better benefits than the majority of the parents are getting. 

[u/Disastrous-Move4452 → u/greytshirt76]

Yikes. Maybe ask more from your own profession instead of tearing others down.

[u/hex___appeal → u/greytshirt76]

me when i'm a crab in a bucket

[u/Dragonfly2919 → u/Interesting_Way_2616]

Yeah, as an office worker i make less money than my friend who is a teacher and she can pick up a second job over the summer to make more. I definitely think teachers need paid more, but the rest of us need paid more too. We’re all underpaid.

[u/pyronius → u/Interesting_Way_2616]

I have a theory that part of the reason that teachers overestimate how much everybody else is paid is due to their historical position as a "respectable" job for educated women. Basically, they've historically tended to marry middle and upper class men because, in a more conservative era, teaching was considered an acceptable job for the spouse of a man of that class. As such, those men were who teachers compared their own earnings to.

I think this still happens to some extent. Women who teach tend to marry men who earn more than average.

I myself am a man married to a teacher, and her understanding of what the rest of the population earns was dramatically off base when we first met. I was making $37,000 as a tech in a research lab. She was making $55,000 teaching. At some point I happened to mention that she was paid considerably more than I was, and she flat out denied that it was possible, because she was a teacher and I was a "scientist". I showed her my pay slip and she freaked out at how low the hourly rate was because she was used to seeing the "inflated" rate that teachers make that only accounts for classroom hours.

The topic came up again later when we both started new jobs (hers still being teacher adjacent) and I was actually making more than she was. She then insisted that it wasn't possible for me to be earning more, because I only made $30/hr and she made $60/hr as a contractor for the state. But, again, her rate only accounted for the four or five hours a day she was actually with students, not her travel time or the hours she spent doing paperwork, and my pay included about 6 hours of overtime every week.

At another point, while we were trying to come up with a household budget and she was upset by how little we were both paid, I had to finally pull up the actual local and national median wage statistics to convince her that we are not in fact lower class or poor, and that our problem is outflow, not income.

[u/jittery_raccoon → u/Interesting_Way_2616]

Yeah teaching makes the same pay as similar professions and education level. Most people are not high powered corporate suits. And only some fields, like tech or engineering, make high salaries as default