Teachers have it pretty good if you look at their schedule (Holidays, Annual Leave Time, Optional Workdays). In my school district the teachers get 25 days off this year (Holidays and Annual Leave) and they have 14 optional teacher workdays. Throw in two months off in the summer and that’s a lot of time off compared to the private sector. I was a teacher/coach and taught driver education during all those days off, plus Saturdays. We had teacher meetings usually two times a month on Wednesdays. A lot of them moaned and groaned about having to stay until about 5 o’clock. It felt like a break to me, since I always worked every day until 6:30. Teachers have a lot of stress, but so does every other profession. You have liberals and conservatives, but it always seemed like the liberals would bring up their political views a lot more than the conservatives. Just my two cents.
As a retired teacher yourself, you know very well about all the unpaid labor we do outside official hours, from grading to planning to committees to extracurricular activities to continuing ed, etc. And you know very well that "optional" workdays have a cost involved if you actually do take them off. I'm at a point in my career where I could take them off, but I live close enough that it's easy enough to go in and get stuff done that I never have time for during a normal school day.
Prorate our salaries to whatever comparable profession you want. We're not well compensated. Claim we only work 10 months of the year, then add a 1/5 of our salary to that to equate it to a 12-month job. We're still well behind comparable jobs. And as far as things the government does and should provide, taking care of kids and educating them should be pretty high on the list. Because it is traditionally a woman's job, though, and because traditionally those women were only working until they could find a husband, all kinds of unpaid labor is expected.
The most outspoken people are usually the ones addressing something they want changed. More often, that's going to be left-leaning folks because by definition, conservatives conserve the status quo. Fix the social ills we see the results of in our classrooms and what do we have to talk about?
I've worked a second job for 20-25 years of my 30.375 year career so far. Money shouldn't be the reason for that. One job should be enough.
