http://http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/Departments/CareerTraining/?article=teacherpaymain
I think a lot of the "overpaid teachers" talk comes from the notion that teachers' hours match up with students' hours: Put in six hours a day, head home around 2 PM, and take summers off. Compared to most jobs, that's scarcely working, right?
Hello--news flash! Classroom time is only the tip of the pencil for a teacher. No one just walks into a roomful of kids without a plan and keeps them fruitfully occupied for six hours at a stretch, day after day. Lesson plans have to be drawn up. There go your weekends.
Then there's homework. If you have 25 kids in your class, and each one turns in one page of homework a day, you have 25 pages to read and mark before tomorrow. There go your evenings.
Furthermore, you have meetings to attend--with other teachers, curriculum experts, administrators, and parents. Plus, when kids bring their life problems into the classroom--and they're human, so they do--who ends up dealing with them? That's right, the teacher. It's not in the job description, but a teacher's obligations inevitably overlap with those of social workers, therapists, and even parents.
Which brings us to our third criterion. How valuable is the contribution teachers make to humanity?
Never mind Mr. Holland's Opus. Forget individual cases. Let's consider the teaching profession as a whole. If doctors save lives, what do teachers do?
Well, let's see. Everything we call civilization has to be passed on to the next generation. Isn't that what teachers do? Reading, writing, adding 26 plus 13, calculating the boiling point of water and naming the vitamins found in carrots, explaining the difference between Turkey and turkey--none of this stuff is in the genes.
Without teachers, civilization would have to be developed from scratch every generation, and man, you can't get too far in one generation. We'd still be listening to eight-track tapes. We wouldn't even have cars! Well, I guess we'd have our parents' cars, but we wouldn't know how to drive them!
So yeah, I guess teaching is important work. On a scale from one to ten, let's give it a nine. (Saving lives has still got to rank higher.)
Interesting article!
I think a lot of the "overpaid teachers" talk comes from the notion that teachers' hours match up with students' hours: Put in six hours a day, head home around 2 PM, and take summers off. Compared to most jobs, that's scarcely working, right?
Hello--news flash! Classroom time is only the tip of the pencil for a teacher. No one just walks into a roomful of kids without a plan and keeps them fruitfully occupied for six hours at a stretch, day after day. Lesson plans have to be drawn up. There go your weekends.
Then there's homework. If you have 25 kids in your class, and each one turns in one page of homework a day, you have 25 pages to read and mark before tomorrow. There go your evenings.
Furthermore, you have meetings to attend--with other teachers, curriculum experts, administrators, and parents. Plus, when kids bring their life problems into the classroom--and they're human, so they do--who ends up dealing with them? That's right, the teacher. It's not in the job description, but a teacher's obligations inevitably overlap with those of social workers, therapists, and even parents.
Which brings us to our third criterion. How valuable is the contribution teachers make to humanity?
Never mind Mr. Holland's Opus. Forget individual cases. Let's consider the teaching profession as a whole. If doctors save lives, what do teachers do?
Well, let's see. Everything we call civilization has to be passed on to the next generation. Isn't that what teachers do? Reading, writing, adding 26 plus 13, calculating the boiling point of water and naming the vitamins found in carrots, explaining the difference between Turkey and turkey--none of this stuff is in the genes.
Without teachers, civilization would have to be developed from scratch every generation, and man, you can't get too far in one generation. We'd still be listening to eight-track tapes. We wouldn't even have cars! Well, I guess we'd have our parents' cars, but we wouldn't know how to drive them!
So yeah, I guess teaching is important work. On a scale from one to ten, let's give it a nine. (Saving lives has still got to rank higher.)
Interesting article!
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