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I am a designer, engineer and entrepreneur, but I have also taught high school in the past. As an engineer, I would not consider working for a place that had a problem with less than 4 weeks vacation. It is absolutely necessary to have that as a minimum to recharge and do a great job. If I'm not allowed to do what I need to to do a great job, I don't want the job, I tell people to give it to some lackey instead and just be comfortable with their full on corporate BS environment. I think that the extremely lengthy vacations should be taken into consideration when discussing teacher pay issues. It's relevant since a lot of teachers take part time jobs in the summer, something 12 and 11 month workers can't do. Some even write books and generate additional income that way, and recognized copyright case law in the US has the cool exception that books written by full time academics are not work for hire by their bosses. That's not the case for those of us in engineering where companies try to grab all they can. Teaching high school in the US is extremely emotionally exhausting. You're expected to be a social worker and you deal with people with problems, yet you have little training and no support or back up or authority for dealing with this. When I was a teacher, if I did not have the entire summer off, I would have gotten a gun and come in and shot the entire administration. Not because I am crazy, I've had a psych eval for security clearance and am completely stable. It's just how close to breaking being a teacher in the US will drive you. The system is incredibly dysfunctional. Work stress is comparable to being a soldier on the front line. Most teachers are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. I am not surprised when I hear of so many female teachers having sex with their students - that is not because they are pedos, it is a stress response from having a total emotional breakdown from working in a horrific system. If the 3 months of vacation time was removed from US schools, we would see a wave of teacher led psychotic breakdowns, suicides and massacres that would be so legendary they would be spoken of 1000 years from now. |
I do agree that time off should be considered when talking about teacher salaries. I know other states are different, but in Texas I feel like teacher salaries are mostly pretty good now, but they weren't for a long time.
In 1997, when I started teaching, my salary was $24,000 per year. That was about 43% below the median household salary in the Austin area at the time.
A teacher starting this year would make $42,000 per year, which is only 15% below the median household salary.
The median salary for the Austin area has only increased ~20% in the past 15 years, but the starting teacher salary (in my district, anyway) has gone up 75% in that same time period.
So, in my opinion, a lot of the "teachers are underpaid" rhetoric comes from folks who haven't run the numbers recently.