Man I taught school for 2 years and coached, so I can actually you know, speak to this from first hand experience unlike most of you.
Teachers have a job that is fair To generous in what they are paid compared to whats expected of them.
I worked 40 hours, on the dot, as a history teacher. Never brought a thing home with me. I worked 50 hours as an English teacher- had typically 10 hours of grading a week to do over the weekend. It was shit I did while watching college hoops or baseball.
Once the taks test or whatever the fuck it’s called for English ended that went down to less writing assignments to the workload went down.
I only worked 187 days. I only needed a bullshit 4 year degree (let’s not pretend education is a hard degree plan). I had no measurables I was held to for production. In had little day to say oversight over me. It was by far the least stressful or pressure packed job I ever had, nothing set high stakes or hard.
I was an above average teacher compared to my peers. My admin loved me because I followed the simple shit that they asked for and parents didn’t call up and complain. My kids liked me ok bc I had a sense of humor and brought passion and excitement to what I was teaching (Love history and literature) and I tried to think out stuff to say, do it what have you for lessons. That said, many times I also phoned it in and that was ok too, which is what I was saying about the job not being hard.
Now, if you could adequately measure somehow the job a great teacher (and I mean top 2-7 or 8 percent) that really gets hard to reach kids to learn does and want
to comp them at 100k or 150k a year or
something like that I’d be fine with it, but I can’t imagine a scenario where the appropriate people get paid for outstanding work in education so I’m just
going to pass on that.
Note- this is a high school setting with measurable work product expected of students. If you are bringing work home I’m elementary Ed you are definitely doing it wrong.
I’m sure the teachers in here will bitch at this and say I’m undervaluing them and what they do. All I can say is I love teachers, my mom was a teacher, my brother taught and coached for 10 years, when I wanted a break mid career and decided I was in a spot where I could do anything I decided to teach because of my respect for the position. And I loved it. But damn, the entitled notching done by those that don’t know how the real world works was just a real beat down. The fact that they’ve convinced so many people in their communities that it’s a tough and thankless job that’s criminally underpaid is a shame, because none of that was true at all in my experience from actually doing it, and comparing it to private sector work.