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Oh boy, your second-hand experience with teachers 20 years ago is very different than what teachers experience today. My wife just resigned after 8 years of teaching. The first thing people always say when you talk about teaching being difficult with little pay is oh they get two months a year off to lounge around and do whatever they want. You want to know what single sentence will trigger a teacher immediately? That one. Teachers are still required to plan and get ready for the next school year over the summer and then they go back a couple weeks earlier than students so it ends up not being as good as it sounds.

Most teachers have extremely high anxiety and are stressed to the max. Neverending paperwork, admin that won't help, and parents that don't care and/or are extremely overbearing. It's a grind and it really takes a special kind of person to do that job yet we pay them so little.

> plan and get ready for the next school year

I don't doubt all of your points, and can imagine the frustration, but regarding the summer off being interrupted by planning work, what's to plan? If you're teaching mostly the same thing year after year, wouldn't you have an established plan that doesn't require significant modification? What does "get ready for the next school year" entail?

> what's to plan? If you're teaching mostly the same thing year after year, wouldn't you have an established plan that doesn't require significant modification? What does "get ready for the next school year" entail?

I’m bookmarking this as a delightful example of “begging the question,” wherein the question is actually begged. You correctly identified and ran past the fundamental underlying assumption: teachers teach virtually the same thing each year.

In reality, curriculum changes can happen as a result of (1) changes in the underlying textbook and course material, precipitated by publishers (2) changes in student and teacher KPIs precipitated by school administration, (3) changes in technological education-delivery platforms, precipitated by school IT, (4) personal changes, precipitated by experience and personal/professional motivation, and (5) changes in professional best-practices, precipitated by scholarship and professional organizations; to name a few.

These things happen regularly, and often simultaneously.

I thought it was a good question, and I didn't really believe your answer. I wanted to see if any statistics support what you said, and the reality is a bit different. Teachers put in fewer hours than other workers, and they work on average 20 hours a week during the summer [1]. To be clear it's more nuanced than "fewer hours" in the article, but the average teacher works 40ish hours a week.

If you're a teacher, I'm sure you're tired of hearing people wonder whether teachers are working all summer, but the fact is it's a great fucking question and you shouldn't be offended when someone asks it. It beggars belief, and it's a question that should be asked over and over again until the answer is "no".

1. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2019/...

I address what work if any teachers perform during the summer to prepare for the upcoming semester.

Your link attempts to quantify the hours teachers work during a work week.

Your statement is unrelated to mine, did you mean to reply elsewhere?

My mistake. When you responded to someone asking what teachers did all summer, you responded in a way that made me believe you thought they did. But now the question is, if you weren't saying that teachers work all summer, what was the point in itemizing the things they have to do each summer? Maybe you responded to the wrong comment? To make things easier, I'll bring back some context from earlier in the thread:

> Teachers are still required to plan and get ready for the next school year over the summer. . .

I thought this was more or less the entire topic of interest. That, and how much teachers work. What do you think the conversation is about? Pretty confused how you could think it's not relevant. You were needlessly combative earlier, so I guess I could chalk it up to that.

> These things happen regularly, and often simultaneously.

Yes, I think my assumption is common. Thanks for the list. The entire thing consists of events I would have expected to happen very infrequently.

"KPIs precipitated by school administration" - sounds horrific. Way too easy to screw up.

I’m not even a teacher and the first and super obvious thing that came to mind is working with special needs children. Like an adhd child or an autistic child might require different lessons plans to incorporate different sensory processing. Don’t teachers also have to re-credential or prove they’re taking continued education every few years or something too? And don’t teachers also teach summer school? Idk. I think maybe we should give teachers more credit… I’m sure there 10x more than I thought of and I am not a teacher nor do I I interact with teachers.

Edit: also wasn’t a huge number of changes made recently on state levels to target schools that teach anything a parent might deem CRT/LGBTQ shit? I’d expect lots of teachers to need to change their lesson plans regularly because of wild political environment nonsense…

I’m sorry your wife quit and I hope she finds a job she likes.

I know many teachers nowadays too. They are friends and neighbors.

In my county, teachers get 10 weeks off and they go back a week early to prepare for school. They also have a few days at the end of the year to wrap up. So it’s actually only 8-9 weeks off where they don’t have to think about school. Of course many do. Just like I think about work on my vacation.

Pay in my state is $53k/year, slightly over the average salary of $51k. So teachers aren’t paid “so little” in my state. It’s not an amazing salary, but it’s ok.

It doesn’t take a “special kind of person” any more than countless other jobs. People fit into jobs and don’t fit into jobs.

I don’t doubt that teachers are stressed out, but I don’t know how much more stressed than other professions. Most jobs are stressful. At least teachers don’t have to worry about layoffs and they have a pension and they have summers off. So there’s pros and cons.

Your 2nd hand experience of teaching from an educator 20 years ago is very different from the current reality. School districts have taken on more task and passed the responsibility of executing them to the frontline workers (teachers).

To save money they technically get laid off every summer and rehired in the fall. They do this because the schoolboard budget can be changed at any moment. If they need to layoff a lot of teachers the formal paperwork is already done. You can imagine this can be extremely stressful, especially for new teachers.

> I’ve always had to spend $500-2000/year on supplies and equipment.

That is supplies bought to use for you by you. It would be different if you bought supplies for someone else.

That’s not just supplies for me. It’s supplies for my team, for office activities, for user events, etc.

My point is that many people buy supplies for their work, it’s not unique to teaching. It’s surprising that it’s brought up as it it’s some unique factor.

> My point is that many people buy supplies for their work

Sure, with the money their work budgets for those supplies. Teachers are having to spend part of their own paychecks to buy supplies.

If your job requires you to pay for supplies out of your own paycheck then that's obviously a raw deal, just a sneaky way to pay lower wages.

To clarify, I meant that many people buy supplies and aren’t reimbursed by their employers.

I agree that it sucks that we aren’t reimbursed by our employers.

At least teachers get a small tax credit. Better than nothing, but still not enough.

I’m willing to bet you make much more than a teacher.

Regardless, IMO it’s less likely a teacher stays because of wanting a summer break, and more that there aren’t alternative jobs for them.

Personally I know a lot of teachers who hate it, but are stuck.

Two noteworthy dimensions when considering difficulty of job, especially as it relates to other professions, including highly-compensated tech workers:

(1) Average salary of teachers is approximately 40% less than the average salary of any STEM-related-field worker).[1]

(2) Schools are a unique legal environment with respect to torts and the criminal law in that actions against teachers which would in other contexts constitute unlawful acts appropriate for remedy in courts is instead most often investigated, adjudicated, and penalty rendered by a combination of the school’s head, administration, and resource officers.

There is also the non-emergent but nevertheless constantly renewed concern about the viability and mortality of teachers and students with respect to mass violence as well.[2]

[1]https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ocwage.pdf

[2]https://www.chds.us/ssdb/

How does ZipRecruiter get those numbers?

By contrast, the BLS [1] says the median pay is $60k, and the bottom 10% earns at most $45k.

This doesn't seem to square with "most teachers make less than $37k".

Perhaps the BLS data is skewed? I'm Canadian, so don't know how they collect it. But my intuition is that they are likely to have access to much better data than ZipRecruiter. The fact that ZipRecruiter thinks no teacher earns between $55k and $70k is also a little dubious.

[1]: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/high-...

You’re right that the BLS is a stronger authority and a more reliable source, generally.

I’d just note that the statistics you cite relate to high school teachers, who are compensated most highly among K-12 teachers, while the discussion in the thread and the ZipRecruiter data relates to teachers broadly, including K-8.

If you expand the Pay or Similar Occupations sections, you'll see data for elementary and middle school teachers. It's roughly the same.

This is a good call-out. Looking online, the BLS uses its Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey (https://www.bls.gov/oes/mb3-methods.pdf) to gather their underlying data.

I put my comment together based on a quick google search and an appreciation for graphics; BUT, I’d take the BLS survey’s response bias over ZipRecruiter’s sample bias any day (the data is derived from ZR’s own job listings).

I’ll make edits to reflect your information. I think the underlying observation that teachers are compensated much less than tech workers is unchallenged (average salary of a teachers is approximately 40% less than the average salary of any STEM-related-field worker).[1]

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ocwage.pdf

> Average salary of teachers is approximately 40% less than the average salary of any STEM-related-field worker).[1]

This makes sense as teachers are basically median pay and STEM is much above median. Also, I think STEM has a very different skill set and higher risk. People get fired all the time in STEM while teacher is a very low risk job.

The related analysis is that comparing one’s expenses without also comparing comparing income is an incomplete comparison. That was the nature of inclusion in the comment in reply to the grandfather commentor.

The attrition is not imaginary. From https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/surve...:

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), there were approximately 10.6 million educators working in public education in January 2020; today there are just 10.0 million, a net loss of around 600,000.

The BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey found that the ratio of hires to job openings in the education sector reached new lows as the 2021-22 school year started. It currently stands at 0.59 hires for every open position, a large decrease from 1.54 in 2010 and 1.06 in 2016.

> retired at 55 or something with 75-100% income.

Not happening anymore.

most teachers I know work a second menial job over summer break because they aren’t paid well

When I graduated in 2008 teachers were doing this. Most I knew had second jobs in the summer. Never really heard of teachers using the summer as a vacation unless they had a spouse who made more money.

My wife's a teacher and neither she nor her collagues have to do this.

All the teachers I know (three in my neighborhood) don’t do this. So I guess we know different teachers.

The US pays teachers pretty well compared to other countries [0] but that doesn’t mean that all areas pay well.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/teacher-salaries-by-country-...