As a developer, I started at nearly 2x what I made as a teacher. After getting real experience, I make more than most administrators and more than any teacher could after a lifetime of service. I have multiple weeks of paid vacation. Aside from a (weak) pension, my benefits are better. My work only follows me home when I am behind schedule (not often) or when there is an outage (a bit cyclical). My quality of life is so vastly better. Another benefit, I now get to work with motivated and smart individuals.
That said, I'm not sure I've ever met a teacher who takes off at 3:20 every day. I imagine it probably averages out to around an hour before and after school, so 7 AM to 4 PM? But there's often grading that happens at home throughout the week. I wouldn't be surprised to see veteran teachers averaging 44-50 hours a week of actual work for the year (with lulls and spikes for midterms/finalls, etc).
Once you put in the time it pretty much turns into one of the most comfortable jobs you can get between decent compensation, lots of time off, good benefits.
I took it to heart. It worked very, very well for me in college. I'd always have homework with me ready to go and when I was waiting for a class to start, or any other short time with nothing to do, I'd do homework. I'd only get a bit done at a time but it really added up and reduced my take home workload considerably.
But you know how spine-jarring school busses are. Maybe if I'd been able to complete it on a laptop instead of worksheets.
But nah, with how I was treated by folks on my bus, my laptop would've been tossed out the window the second day.
I was lucky enough to always live very close to my schools, so hours spent commuting to school is entirely alien to me, and barring safety issues, I'm not sure a directed extracurricular learning program wouldn't be more beneficial (and if the student or parents care enough to commute, I imagine they could work out some program from available sources). Then again, I've never been put in a situation that young where it relied that much on my own motivation.
The primary reasons the school-bus commute was long was a) meandering suburbia with only 1-2 students per stop and b) a 20 mile trek on the highway at 45mph.
If I had been able to drive (or carpooled), my commute would have been less than 35 minutes.
I guess that makes sense. It's not just "better" in the sense of different schools in an area may be better or worse, but also highly directed in certain areas. I can see the draw of that.
> meandering suburbia with only 1-2 students per stop
Yes, come to think of it, people that rode the bus at my school probably had at least a 40-45 minute ride in the earlier stops just from this. I think I rode the bus once when going to a friend's house after school, so this didn't come to mind. The rest of the time I always walked (High School was literally across the street from my house, Middle School was a 20 minute brisk walk). Like I said, alien.
Thanks for your explanation. :)
(source: three parents/step-parents were school teachers)
It's a great way to shuffle cost from one government budget (education) to another one (unemployment benefits), and also a convenient way to get rid of annoying parts of the staff.
They have over 20 days of holidays built in during the school year and a legitimate two months off between years.
My comment was based on observations of my SO, who is a high school biology teacher. She legitimately does not have to work at all for the great majority of the summer if she doesn't want to. I understand this may vary a lot by school district and location, and of course even if you don't have to work over the summer there are still benefits to doing so.
The mere fact that many do take summer jobs is proof of that, IMO.
Or it's a proof that they need the money.
Teachers actually need to cram a lot in that time. All the preparation for next year, all self-education they need to do to stay up-to-date, select reading and learning materials. Planning the curriculum etc. The equivalent to all that work that freelancers factor into their daily rate and all the work that employees often do on the job ("I'll need to read the documentation so I know how to properly do that", "I'll google it", ...).
The fact that they still take on summer jobs on top of that can serve as an indicator that they actually don't have too much to do in that time or it can serve as an indicator that they need the money more than their time off.
Source: a friend who taught elementary school in the Boston area.
Where I went to school, teachers with less than five years of tenure essentially had to sponsor at least one extracurricular activity, just to earn enough extra pay to live on.
And then they still have to do grading and planning when the kids aren't there. That can be done away from the school building, but it still counts as work.
Nursing is similar to teaching in that you're not likely to get rich off of it, and it's not even an easy job at all, but it is a very stable one which pays a solid middle-class wage for life in pretty much any area of the country, from huge cities to small rural towns in the midwest. And, while the hours are rough as a new nurse fresh out of school, they're not bad at all with experience -- certainly it's a far more family friendly career than many others in healthcare, like being a physician.
If my mom had been a programmer, she definitely wouldn't have weathered the moves they've made as well as she has. In fact, she'd have been the one forcing my dad to move with her, as decent programming jobs simply do not exist where they live.
I am sure that by getting a master's degree, teaching in private schools, being in certain states or cities, teaching classes that are in great demand, etc., teachers can reach higher salaries. But I think we can agree that by becoming teachers in the first place, they pretty much accepted the risk of never earning much.
Likewise, not all programmers in start-ups earn 40k, which is what the example was about.
For instance, you did it in this very post. Do you really think that all high school teachers are locked into making $40k for life? Here where I live (a large city, but also a pretty affordable one), teachers start at ~$55k in base salary, get a whole range of benefits including a pension plan, actually really do have the summers off (plus numerous other breaks), and leave work at 3:20 PM every day. If you were to have them work year-round and go home at 6-7PM and convert the pension plan into salary, the salary would easily exceed that of most entry-level engineers across all disciplines in the area. When I graduated college, I had engineering friends being offered salaries in the $60-70k range for considerably less stable jobs, much longer hours, virtually no time off, and much fewer benefits.