Comment by throwaway787544 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway787544 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway787544

Many teachers work very long hours. Ones I've dated did a minimum of 60 hours. They would work their day shift and then go home and work more, and work on weekends, and then do tutoring for extra cash.

Do you know how frustrating and exhausting teaching is? Very. They also don't get hazard pay for working in dangerous schools. One teacher I knew literally stopped teaching and became a kind of official bouncer (I don't know what it's called); when kids would get violent his job was to restrain them. The reason he switched was the kids' disrespect and his own desire to see them improve was crushing his soul.

Many teachers use their own money to buy their students' class materials.

If you're a teacher in New Jersey, you have to also live in New Jersey, a state with a ridiculously high tax rate.

The years of service thing is a fair yardstick because it's comparing apples to apples. We are not paying them based on what a different job would pay them, we pay them based on the job we want them to do.

Benefits and pension are wildly overblown. Half of teachers don't even qualify for pension and benefits vary greatly. https://www.teacherpensions.org/blog/what-average-teacher-pe...

It's not enough money.

How old were the ones you dated?

In general, the hours spent teaching diminish over time. At the beginning of a teacher's career, they spend a lot of time outside of class building lesson plans and creating tests and homework assignments. These legitimately take a lot of time. And they aren't perfect, so the teacher often sees that they need to make big changes after those lesson plans and tests and homework assignments hit the students.

But after a few iterations, they have those tools, and at that point things settle down a lot. The material only needs to be updated infrequently. Most of that time that in the first few years was spent building those things is freed back up, and it's not replaced by anything.

I know three teachers well (Chicago area; two quite senior, the other recently retired). Hours might have once diminished over time as you suggest, but their experience as told to me contradicts this trend: curricula have been changing so quickly in response to administrative decree that every few years everything gets thrown out and rebuilt. When you add to that decreasing resources for classrooms and increasing student-to-teacher ratios, it is not surprising to me that they work more hours than anybody else I know.

The teacher in that example had 13 years of service and worked in one of the better paying public schools in New Jersey. She said she was paid pretty highly at around $60K (iirc). I do remember there was a kind of pecking order where more entry level teachers would make lesson plans, but the senior teachers still had to help the younger teachers learn how to do it, and sometimes do it themselves when nobody else could (teachers might trade between each other what extra work they needed).

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