As my husband said, I teach. I teach first grade in an urban school district. I make a decent income if you consider that it’s my family’s second income. I could not be a single parent or the single bread-winner in a family on my salary. I’m not going to come in here and complain about my salary, though, or justify the many reasons why I should be worth more. Those of you who know, know, and those of you who disdain, well, nothing I say will ever change your minds. While I would LOVE a nice, big raise, here’s what I’d rather see happen:
School Board, please stop spending 250,000 dollars a year on the sod and flowers around your building as you cut our library budget.
Central Administration, please stop spending thousands a month on catering your meetings as you raise the lunch tray prices for teachers and children.
School Board, please stop raising my classroom budget by 10% as you completely cut out art, music, and physical education programming to afford it. I can buy some pencils, but my kids need those enrichments as a part of their education.
For the OP and those who’ve replied with disgust and disdain for the teachers: Can you find no fault with the districts and administrations that also refuse to negotiate or manage their district and emplyees with some modicum of fiscal responsibility? These people are the ones responsible for the district and how the money is spent. We had one administration that invested a chunck of money on redecorating the school board meeting room…while some toilets at two elementary schools went for months unfunctioning. My classroom carpet hasn’t been replaced (or the carpet for my whole school building)…it’s the same carpet the room had when the building opened in 1982. That’s 23 years of muddy shoes, kool-aid spills, kid vomit, and leaky ceilings growing in my carpet. Three of the assistant superintendants got whole new suites of office furniture last year, though.
No rancor for the adminstrations at all? It’s all the teachers’ faults for wanting more?
I don’t recall anyone saying this. I don’t believe that teachers as a profession deserve a miserable lot in life; I just believe that they are generally well paid for what they do. If their average salary were $20,000 a year, you might have something. It’s not.
I agree with all of that. And no one has the right to browbeat and insult someone who genuinely believes that that person is being paid enough and does have a fairly cushy life.
The issue here is not that teachers are in some magical class where they should be treated like dirt and paid nothing. The issue is that teachers are not in some magical class where they should make whatever they want, without anyone even being allowed to question whether they already make enough for what they do.
I have found the responses in this thread to be exactly what I expected; name calling and profanity for anyone who dares even question, for one second, the teacher party line that they are all miserably underpaid.
Are you kidding me? My view that there is excessive screaming and ranting by one group (teachers) does not mean that stupid acts by school administrators are somehow pardoned. I’d be on your side with every example you gave.
In fact, as an aside in our lunchtime discussion today, someone suggested that we should “call the bluff” of the teachers, and drastically raise money budgeted to schools, with the stipulation that not an additional dime of it go into raised salaries. Everything into books, computers, carpeting, and infrastructure. Turn out school boards who spend money on their meeting rooms while the children have text books from 1983. I have no problem with that.
That claim was, also, full of shit by the way. You haven’t got any data for ‘most’ schools. So at best you’re a dishonest debater. At worst you’re an asshole and a dishonest debater.
First, your anecdotal evidence does not contradict theirs. And to call them liars on top of everything was terrifically base and slimy.
Second, as people have provided you with cites, there is a teacher shortage, there are budget issues. You are either ignorant, or ignorant and lazy; while still being more than willing to spew shit.
Again, idiot, you do not have a valid sample to posit any observations about the profession as a whole. So, again, you’re just being an ignorant fuck spewing shit.
Great! So half the battle is won, but again the teachers get the short end of the stick. By making the needs of YOUR children a part of their labour battle, their ultimately doing you a favour. I suppose they could do their job with 25 year old text books, but they want YOUR children to have better than that. And for this, they still get shitty salaries, overworked, high class sizes and the like?
I’m not a teacher, but I’m going to give you a little lesson anyway. When your very first post in a thread is full of nothing but contempt, insult, and disdain for the other side of the debate, the people on the other side are going to treat you with contempt, insult, and disdain in return. You’ve acted like an asshole since the word “Go” in this thread. Stop fucking whining when people treat you like you’ve treated them.
Yeah, they’re the same ones whose local representatives decided that it was a good idea to install a $70,000 dollar stained glass window in the high school in the WORST section of town with the highest student population of gangsta types.
But wait, government knows better than we do what’s best for we mere citizens.
So they should continue to eat shit sandwiches and smile? The mind reels!!
And this is a good thing? A right thing? Them trying to change this concept is bad? Something to be squashed? STAY in your places you second class citizens you.
Good God, I’m speechless. Okay, nearly so. I’m not angry like the teachers here, I’m just stunned at the idociy and ignorance of this reasoning.
You need more?
No, not all teachers are overworked, some have nice cushy gigs. But many teachers do get shafted, and your casual and rude dismissal is just pure shit.
The teacher party line? Oh, please. Did you ever wonder how the so-called party line got to be so damn common?
I don’t have the unmitigated arrogance to make claims about all teachers, or even most teachers, because school districts vary so wildly. But I know the district my mother’s taught in all my life, where I went to school. I know the schedule the woman keeps, and it would bring me to my fucking knees within a month.
She’s required to be at school by 7:10 (except on 3 mornings a month when she has bus duty, then she has to be there at either 6:30 or 6:45), at which time she deals with administrative stuff, runs off papers, that sort of thing. She picks up her class and walks them to the room at 7:50. Most days she gets a 10-minute break mid-morning for recess (unless she’s got playground duty or has kids who are being kept in), so she can go to the bathroom, set things up for the next class, return a call from a parent, etc. She also gets a 22-minute break in which to walk her class to the lunchroom, get her own lunch, make her way to the staff lounge, eat, and get back to pick up the class and take them back to the room. Four afternoons a week she gets a 30-minute break to talk to parents, do paperwork, etc., while the kids are in music, art, gym, or the library. Again, that includes transport time for the kids, going and coming. After classes end, she’s got parents to talk to, other teachers to coordinate with, and the tutoring program to deal with. It’s generally 5 or later when she leaves the building on a normal day. When she gets home, there’s usually 2-3 hours of paperwork to do every night. Ten more hours on the weekend, grading, doing the plan book, etc., more when progress reports and grade cards are due. Most weeks there’s a play or a ballgame or a concert or a staff meeting or a parent-teacher organization meeting that eats up another 4 hours or so tucked in there somewhere.
Her schedule wasn’t always quite this bad; she picked up the tutoring gig when I was high school for extra money, and that’s about 8 extra hours a week. And the summer school thing, along with the Director of Extended School Services headache, came while I was in college. That’s an extra few hours/week through the school year and most of the time during the summer. It used to be worse, though; she used to be on the school decision-making council, and that was 10-12 unpaid hours a week, including an assload of time in the summer.
Yes, $40,000 doesn’t sound like a bad salary, on the face of it. But like I said before, it works out to about the same hourly wage you could get doing semi-skilled labor on a construction site or in a factory. And you gotta remember that Mom’s at the top of the payscale because she’s been there for so damned long, and that amount includes her supplemental income from the tutoring and summer school, so that’s actually a rather inflated figure for that school district. Typical salaries are more like $25-30K. This is for people with a fucking master’s degree, mind you. Paying highly educated professionals $13/hour at the top of the scale is NOT a decent wage. It’s just not.
Are you actually reading the stuff you are putting out? “Invasive time?” “Housework time?”
60% of teachers find their jobs more stressful than 2 years ago. Wow, I bet 60% of lawyers and of doctors might find their own jobs more stressful than 2 years ago.
But please, continue to prove me wrong with your incredible sources. If you could send me something from the Chicago Teacher’s Union on the horrible hours, I’d appreciate it.
Out of curiosity, where do all of you people who say teaching is a cushy gig live? Where does your state fall in the education rankings? I’m guessing it’s probably somewhere in the top quartile. And I’d further guess that those of us with horror stories to tell live in states somewhere in the bottom quartile.
Yes, because I dared to suggest that most teachers are not overworked and underpaid, it was full of nothing but contempt, insult, and disdain. Right. Yes, I was definitely throwing out the “Fuck yous” and “Assholes” in my first post. Uh huh.
God forbid anyone say something you disagree with, as it apparently elevates it to the level of “contempt”.
Okay…I’ve gotta say something before my head explodes from the anger and my teacher wife (who will be home tonite sometime around 6 or 7pm) finds me dead at the keyboard.
SlyFrog, I’m sorry for doing this, I’m usually not this verbal with my anger, but fuck you! Fuck you and your attitude about all of this. I mean this honestly, when I say please, please, please for the love of God or Mothra or whatever deity you praise, put your child in private school. To have you as a parent of a child in my wife’s classroom would be a nightmare.
Phew…thanks for letting me get that off of my chest, I feel much better now.
I’m going to go off on a little tangent here and wonder why in a country that “values” education so much, we’re willing to pay our police, firefighters, and teachers a pittance compared to the amount we are willing to pay athletes. The average salary for NBA players is almost $4 MILLION dollars a year (cite - http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/20041216.html). What in the holy blue fuck are we thinking as a country? We pay these guys so much money and they contribute nothing to society in comparison to the teachers, firefighters, and police. The real travesty is that my wife isn’t making $100,000 a year (I bet at that salary, she’d be willing to give up her cushy 2 months off also) and the guy throwing a ball down court is making $50,000.
End of rant…good luck to all you teachers our there. My heart is with you.
That’s fair enough; I never claimed that no schools sucked, that no teachers were underpaid. There are terrible areas, and there are districts that don’t pay enough. I don’t believe it is a problem across the board.
I live in Minnesota, and Mark Dayton, our Democractic Senator, tells me this from his webpage:
“Recently, a defunding of public education in the state has occurred, so that, Minnesota has ranked 21st among the 50 states in per pupil elementary and secondary education spending, and 32nd in smaller class size. Our average public school teacher’s salary is $2,000 below the national average.”
Imagine that, a mostly rural state ranks $2,000 below the national average (I bet we pay other professionals as much as say states like Illinois or New York with much higher populations and costs of living). We are in the top half for per pupil spending.
We are not in the bottom quartile; there is plenty of griping regarding teacher pay here from what I can see.
Well, actually the OP himself did. And the implications of many of the threads agreeing with the OP are along those lines as well.
And as for the figures of 40K etc being bantied about, divide that over the hours they actually work. When you’re coming up with figures like 12 bucks an hour, for a person who has a degree and does the work they do, that’s ridiculous. Any day laborer makes that per hour, or more with no skills or education at all.
And if a person is STILL making only 40k after 30 some odd years in service. Something is wrong with that picture, no matter WHAT profession they are in.
Again, our main complaints are that NO one has the right to dictate what is “enough” for any other given profession. THAT is arrogance and ignorance. Aside from which, the posts that started out certainly were NOT somewhat reasonably stated like your above. They started OUT with vitriolic complaints of “whininess” and so on, they basically relegated teachers and any needs or wants they may have to unacceptable mutterings from the second class citizens.
No one is saying they should be in some magical class. All we’ve ever said is that they should have the same rights as any other profession to improve their working situations regarding treatment, pay and so on.
Where on EARTH has anyone here said that they should “make whatever they want”? Striking and the associated heartaches and extreme financial burdens that come along with it is not a path to be taken lightly. If the teachers who are considering this, have stated it as a possibility, the things that they’re asking for are not likely to be “mere” greed-driven motives.
? I have not called you anything, nor sworn at you. And others who have have done so in response to YOUR insults, not unprovoked.
When you take a hard line, and rush in all brashly throwing insults right and left at any given group, not expecting them to take offense is just silly.
Lastly, I’m not a teacher… I only did a very short lived stint as a substitute. I DO teach at the University level, but this can’t even be remotely compared to the k-12 public school system. We are treated fairly well and are paid comparable rates to similar outside work, at least we PE instructors are. And my job as a PE instr. is only a sideline fun job. I very much ENJOY teaching aerobics and dance. I have a “real” job for my regular paycheck.
So my only “dog in this fight” is that the ultimate people who will be hurt ARE in fact our kids by way of losing the good teachers and ending up with the crappy ones, or the new ones who quickly burnout and move on (noted in some of the links I provided earlier).
So for me at least, there IS no “teacher party line”.
There is enough evidence (and again, I provided links earlier), that teacher burnout, pay too low, hours too long, admin and parents too uncaring is pretty widespread. So just because you know of several teachers in your own area that are just fine and dandy and who are living the high life, and just because not ALL teachers have these conditions, says NOTHING about the overALL system-wide problems in our public school system.
Again I refer you to just the mere example of the $70k stained glass window. Then there are the flower gardens I think it was faeriebeth mentioned. WTF? Our Dept of Ed in fine form there by golly. Nevermind that parents are expected to pay for any sports or music programs they may want their kids in. Why isn’t this money going to computers? Books, Supplies so that teachers don’t have to purchase them out of their own pockets? And so on.
Oh yeah, people who are paid to research and know what they’re doing and stuff…yeah right.
Yeah, I feel great about it. Thanks for being reasonable. I disagree with your stance; hopefully if I ever meet you you wouldn’t have a problem with me saying fuck you to you and your family. Why not? I might be upset, and it might make me feel better.
What does overpaying athletes have to do with whether teachers are overpaid? Compared to Kevin Garnett, everyone is underpaid. Your argument has nothing to do with teachers
Me too, along with construction workers, foundry workers, librarians, city clerks. Hey, I know, we should just give everyone more money because everyone works really hard!