I GOT to hit a teacher once. He fancied himself some sort of kung-fu master or something, and wanted to demonstrate his mad skillz.
He held his hand, palm out, in front of his face. He told me to place my fist against his palm. I did, and he closed his eyes. Then he said the magic words: “Try to hit me”.
I rared back and punched him hard in the stomach. Then he told me, in a bit of discomfort, that I supposed to try to hit him in the face. Well, duh! His hand was in the way.
This was a special circumstance, he asked me to hit him. I don’t thing the kid in the OP had any business hitting his teacher. I bet he was trying to flirt in a misguided teenage sort of way, just trying to get her attention.
The salary is for 185 (or whatever) working days, not per year. When I began teaching, we were paid the amount in 18 checks over the 9 month year. No other choice. It was only later that we began to get the option have the sum spaced out over 12 months if so desired. While nice for those who don’t budget well, this actually benefits the district more as they get to hold your money longer.
Another misconception, here. I do have to contribute to my pension. 11% of my salary goes to that. Yes, I know that there are precious few “pensions,” but there are still company matching IRA’s, etc. in existance. Usually for the people with a higher education level. And I’ll point out that I said, not just “the average joe,” but “the average joe (with a masters)”.
FTR, there are a great number of teachers who are making less than they could in the private sector.
And these are the same teachers that we can least afford to lose to the private sector. It’s the ones for whom teaching is the highest-paying job they’re ever going to get that are the ones we need to boot out of the schools.
I’m no naif: I know that there are some ubercraptacular teachers out there. I want salaries to increase, but I also want standards for teachers to increase at the same time. Last week, I had some fellow studetns in my education program put on a presentation about various countries of the world. One of their countries was Africa, and thye included a fun fact: “Egypt and Cairo are two cities in Africa that have over nine million people living in them.” Granted, this wasn’t a geography class, but O my Fucking Lord, these yahoos are going to be teaching your kids.
That, as I see it, is the probelm. It’s very easy for idiots to get teaching licenses. Let’s change that.
I lean pretty much to the right, and I’d say Miller is a good bit left of me, but it seems to me that he almost always has the most articulate argument of any posters, be they left or right. He is one shining example of a poster who, although we don’t share many similarities in politics or lifestyle or whatever, I can always count on to put forth his position in a reasoned manner. I hope he sticks around for a very long time. Sorry for the hijack, again, but I just wanted to say I respect Miller and have wanted to give him props for some time.
we were discussing a teacher’s salary as compared to salaries in other fields. Since most other salaries are paid on an annual basis, I annualized a teacher’s salary for comparison. For Pete’s sake, as you just observed, teacher’s should be happy they can take their whole salary in just nine months.
and that funds the pension, but it’s a pension (you do know how drastically different a pension and 401(k) or IRA are?), and as such, unless it bankrupts and even then only if it’s not adequately insured, it is a guranteed right to payment for so many years after retirement. If my 401(k) loses half its value in a small market bust though, well I’ve got half the 401(k) I used to have
The point, Whole Bean, is that we do not get paid for the summer months. We get $X for working X number of days. That money, depending on the district, may or may not be paid over 12 months. Though you may not necessarily have characterized it as such, it is a common misconception that we have three months paid vacation every year.
I know the difference quite well and have an IRA in addition to my pension. But you know one thing I am taking away from this? A sense of bitterness on your part. If teaching is such a soft berth, why are you not doing it? You seem irrationally pissed off over things like pensions v. IRA’s and “annualized salaries.”
I think they send all these teachers straight to the public schools in southern Alabama that I attended as a kid. Funny we should be talking about violence in schools, it was these same teachers that paddled the tar out of me weekly.
I will point out, yet again, if you feel that the advantage / disadvantage ratio of being a teacher is better than being a <insert whatever>, get your cert and become a teacher. Alternatively, since you’re already a nurse, become a school nurse. Their salaries are usually tied to the teachers’ salary schedule, and, I believe, are in as much demand as both teachers and nurses.
In case you didn’t notice, that guy was a moron.
Then I suggest you go back over your reading comprehension. (You know, that’s where you try to understand what you’re reading?)
Diane, maybe I have underestimated your contribution to this discussion. We need more people like you who, over one message board thread about one incident, can make an accurate and critical judgement of the mentality and personal qualifications of a first-year teacher. We especially need people who can see through a lack of support from the administration and identify the weaknesses of the teacher for what they are. Good for you!
Although your comment was directed at Diane, I just wanted to jump in and say that I read the OP in a similar manner. It just seems like a dumb kid, jokingly punched the teacher (which is still, IMHO, very wrong and not at all funny). I never once got that the kid was some vicious psycho who was trying to maul his teacher.
Now, upon hearing the kid’s follow up comments, that does change my opinon slightly-- although not too much. He is jut some dumb, pissed off kid who is trying to be macho. Punish him, by all means, but I don’t see at all how he is the vile attacking scum that he is being painted as.
Not mad in the least. Just “fighting ignorance,” brother.
Someone said some teachers work for what amounts to minimum wage – I think I was able to dispel that notion, as the poster graciously conceded;
Someone said that teachers average 80-90 hour (not counting weekend work) weeks – after a back and forth the same poster admitted that the average for HS teachers was probably closer to 45 (he’d seen it somewhere is at least what he said);
Someone tried to cloud the “annual income” debate by saying that teachers only get paid 18 weeks instead of 24 – I point out that this adds nothing to the argument as we were talking about “annual income”—I have a buddy that gets paid every quarter, doesn’t change the amount of his annual income;
Someone compared a teacher’s pension to a 401(k) because he has to ‘contribute’ to his teacher’s pension – I pointed out the drastic difference in the vulnerability of the ‘contributions’
Were this another (not so close to home) topic, you might even be making the same accurate observations that I am.
Thing is, my mom was a teacher and is now a professor in elem. ed. (teaches teachers), and I am well aware that teachers have a lot to complain about. Yeah, pay, to an extent, is one of those things. But, as LHOD has observed, there are some pretty stupid teachers out there, and I am here to tell you that pay will not rise until teaching standards do. With some of these craptastic teachers unionized into permanence, this may not come any time soon. That’s something for good teachers to bitch about.
The problem is that it’s going to be very hard to raise teaching standards until pay rises. I think we need something like NCLB, only without the idiotically-designed end-of-grade tests and with more of the well-designed requirements for highly-qualified teachers. And we need it to be well-funded.
My grand plan is that we give our five-years-notice from being the world’s policement, ratchet back our military to European levels (while inviting our allies to make up the difference if they think it’s necessary), and spend the peace dividend on our schools. I don’t think we can solve the problem without money.
I don’t want to fuel this, because pissing (and his slightly cleaner cousin, spitting) contests are a waste of time, but there might be something to this. It’s been my observation that the people who complain most about how their profession is underappreciated are cops and teachers. It’s not so much that folks want to be teachers or cops and it’s not even that they disagree with the intial assessment, that these professions are by-in-large underappreciated. It’s more that, well some of us think we’re underappreciated too, and we’re tired of y’all getting all the pity.
heh. That’s fine; believe me I understand. (Before being a teacher, I was a paramedic - you know, a “bus-driver?”)
Chalk up my defensiveness to working in a town where we have had people get up in front of a town budget meeting to say that, back in their day, they had math one year and science the next, and that was good enough for them, so it’s good enough for the kids today. We also routinely have people tell us that we should teach more classes with less prep per day, act as a day care, never fail kids, make sure that kids are prepared for the real world, and all for less money. After a couple of years of defending yourself to folks like that, you kinda get, you know, a little defensive.
(…and, because I never learned how to let things die peacefully, I just want to mention how our governor has made remarks to the effect that I may not be able to count on my pension when I retire…)
