Quote:
Originally Posted by BossChief
Most teachers are really great people with huge hearts and they deserve appreciation for such, but let's not get out of hand. They work 2/3 of the year and when you consider that, their pay isn't terribly out of whack with other professions that also greatly impact lives.
The average teacher salary in California is almost 70,000 per year. Nationwide, it's right around 60,000.
Let's not act as if that's some crazy low amount.
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That's the thing, contract wise, yes it's 2/3rds out of the year. However, my wife was an elementary teacher for 3 years and typically worked 7:30-9 5 days a week and then would do about 5 hours of prep on Sunday.
In the summer, she was gone for professional development roughly 5 weeks of her 9 weeks "off"
She made 45,000 in her 3rd year in one of the most expensive parts of the country.
It's not a teach out of the textbook job anymore. It's making curriculum accessible to every student in the room, it's adapting to everyone's needs, it's incorporating mass amounts of technology into every lesson, it's being a parent/role model/mediator/counselor every single minute you're in the classroom.
I haven't seen a pay increase in 3 years, and this year I had the misfortune of getting furloughed in a district that I just gained tenure from. The hardest part of losing my job in the high school was that I wouldn't get to see the kids I started with 3 years ago graduate this year. I worked insanely hard in getting some kids that were in really bad places to find the value of every day and to work hard to get what they want. I had internships in place for some that the new teacher didn't bother to follow up on.
Most of those opportunities were created after my contracted time. It was me going into the community and advocating for my students.
It's a grueling job some days. But it's rewarding on just about all of them.