...people in well paid jobs typically also have decent vacation and sick leave allowances. ... Based on the lifestyles of professionals around here, well paid white collar work seems to come with many weeks of paid vacation and many paid holidays.
The vast majority of jobs in industry give you two weeks out of twelve to start with, maybe moving up to four if you work at the company for a long time. Many companies combine sick leave with vacation, and you get some random number of days that's usually below 20. If you get really sick or need surgery, chances are you won't get any vacation that year. Do a search; this is the industry standard.
Contractors (and there are a lot of them) often get no time off, no sick pay, no insurance...nothing but their hourly wage.
Sorry, but sometimes I get the impression that many teachers aren't aware of how things are in other workplaces.
At a minimum, teachers get the following vacations in addition to sick pay:
- Two weeks at Christmas (10 days)
- A week in the winter (5 days)
- A week in April (5 days)
These three vacations
alone make four weeks of time off out of a
ten-month work year. So when complaining that a teachers "only" gets a salary of $60,000, remember that this number is for part-time work (~75%).
Here's a site showing
average teacher salaries in California. The overall average teacher salary (excluding benefits) in the state is ~$68K for ten months of work. This sounds pretty good to me, at least in California.
Interestingly, the site says that average salaries have gone up recently because many junior, lower-paid teachers got laid off. So: it doesn't matter if they were better teachers than the more senior ones. They got sacked because they were junior. There have to be poor teachers in the senior group --- and the system has preserved them, at a higher cost, while jettisoning better (but junior) teachers.
I don't know what you mean about average salaries. Average is average. Roughly half are below an average and half are above. What's your point?
Being well prepared to teach 6 periods per day, and keeping up in any kind of meaningful way on the work of 130 students is not doable with an hour of prep time per day.
The school day goes from 8:30-2:30 and there is an hour allotted for prep time and correcting. Fine. But what about the time after 2:30? Most people work until 5 or 6 (many professionals work even later). You're saying that teachers stop working at 2:30? If so, this brings your time commitment from ~75% down to ~50%.
