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Annecdata: as a teacher in an inner city high school, I did not break past 50k/year for the three years I was there. That includes the summers I worked. Between grading, lesson planning, meetings, and teaching, my typical week day started before 7am, ended around 8pm or later. Typically most of my Saturday was used up and half my Sunday. Normally all of spring and winter break was used up likewise. I typically got close to a week off in summer.

As a developer, I started at nearly 2x what I made as a teacher. After getting real experience, I make more than most administrators and more than any teacher could after a lifetime of service. I have multiple weeks of paid vacation. Aside from a (weak) pension, my benefits are better. My work only follows me home when I am behind schedule (not often) or when there is an outage (a bit cyclical). My quality of life is so vastly better. Another benefit, I now get to work with motivated and smart individuals.

It's my understanding, from an ex-gf in college who was going through the teaching credential program at the time and had a mother that was a teacher, that there's a lot of work loaded on teachers inthe beginning, as they need to develop lesson plans for everything from scratch (where "develop" may mean find and adapt in some cases). Then, after a couple years it's settles into a normal churn of updating or replacing a much smaller portion of lesson plans as you go, and the rest of the time is the normal grading work.

That said, I'm not sure I've ever met a teacher who takes off at 3:20 every day. I imagine it probably averages out to around an hour before and after school, so 7 AM to 4 PM? But there's often grading that happens at home throughout the week. I wouldn't be surprised to see veteran teachers averaging 44-50 hours a week of actual work for the year (with lulls and spikes for midterms/finalls, etc).

Teachers make less to start as a result of the unions. The people running the union are later in their careers so the increased wages tend to accumulate to more senior positions. At least, that's how it's going for my friend who is a teacher.

Once you put in the time it pretty much turns into one of the most comfortable jobs you can get between decent compensation, lots of time off, good benefits.

To be fair, no teacher I have ever known has stopped working at 3:20 PM. Grading and planning often go far into the evening.

Additionally, no teacher I have ever known has had the summer off. Summer is when they do catch-up work, lesson planning, etc., the technical debt payback of the teaching world.

(source: three parents/step-parents were school teachers)

To be fair, no teacher I've ever known as received only 10 day vacation and 10 holidays.

They have over 20 days of holidays built in during the school year and a legitimate two months off between years.

No, they have 2 months between school years in which they are not at the front of a classroom. For a lot of teachers that's time used for continuing education, for prep for the upcoming school year, etc. - or for a summer job.

Both my parents were teachers. While there was some summer work, in no way was it nearly as intense as the school year.

The mere fact that many do take summer jobs is proof of that, IMO.

> The mere fact that many do take summer jobs is proof of that, IMO.

Or it's a proof that they need the money.

It's only proof that they desire more money or can find a use for more money. "Need" is an overloaded term. I know developers with six figure salaries who feel like they "need" more money and occasionally do contract work on the side as a result.

By that argument nobody needs any money. Why pay rent when you can have https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/. Why pay for groceries when https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2016/05/20/sweet-p... feeds you just as well? We just "desire it"

If I had two months off a year I'd take a summer job at Starbucks or whatever as well yet I don't need the money by any means whatsoever even if I took a prorated pay cut. Hell, I don't need to work at all because my spouse's income is more than enough to live off of very comfortably, but I do. The amount of time I work isn't an indication of the amount of money I need.

The argument in the parent posts is that teachers actually don't have two month off. They just have two month where they don't have to do client (that is pupil) - facing work to do.

Teachers actually need to cram a lot in that time. All the preparation for next year, all self-education they need to do to stay up-to-date, select reading and learning materials. Planning the curriculum etc. The equivalent to all that work that freelancers factor into their daily rate and all the work that employees often do on the job ("I'll need to read the documentation so I know how to properly do that", "I'll google it", ...).

The fact that they still take on summer jobs on top of that can serve as an indicator that they actually don't have too much to do in that time or it can serve as an indicator that they need the money more than their time off.

(I'm the one who made the original reply about teachers.)

My comment was based on observations of my SO, who is a high school biology teacher. She legitimately does not have to work at all for the great majority of the summer if she doesn't want to. I understand this may vary a lot by school district and location, and of course even if you don't have to work over the summer there are still benefits to doing so.

Or if you're in Germany, many teachers are running on temporary contracts that always last for the school year, so they will be receiving unemployment benefits during the summer break, and (hopefully!) get a new contract for the next school year.

It's a great way to shuffle cost from one government budget (education) to another one (unemployment benefits), and also a convenient way to get rid of annoying parts of the staff.

Teachers in my mother's district in Virginia also work on a contractual basis. However, they renew their contracts at the end of the school year even though they aren't actually working and getting paid over the summer. As a result, they are technically employed and ineligible for unemployment.

Alternatively, I have 3 teacher friends coming back from month long vacations right now.

In all careers, some people are martyrs unnecessarily. Yes, there's a bit of prep work needed right before the next school year depending on what classes they have for the following year, but except that last week, the time's free if they want it to be.

Actually according to http://transparentcalifornia.com/ my daughter's elementary school teacher makes around 130k in a public school.

There are lots of places where teachers easily make 80k or more. Most states also drive additional salary requirements based on the level of education the teacher has. Also, the number of years teaching (though sometimes tied to the number of years in the specific school system/district) include increases too.

Source: a friend who taught elementary school in the Boston area.

There are also teacher unions involved.

I once had it explained by a teacher in highschool (in CA), that the compensation was based on both years worked and additional education they had completed. IIRC, teaching for 20+ years and taking all the education could net you $65k-$85k ~ 20 years ago. That was the upper range though.

That probably includes medical and pension.

Many are faculty sponsors of extracurricular activities. Band directors, for instance, have to stay late for marching/pep band practices and for football/basketball games. Science and math teachers stay late for the academic competition teams. Team sports have coaches.

Where I went to school, teachers with less than five years of tenure essentially had to sponsor at least one extracurricular activity, just to earn enough extra pay to live on.

And then they still have to do grading and planning when the kids aren't there. That can be done away from the school building, but it still counts as work.

I had a teacher in high school once explain to us a side lesson on time management, she says she used moments of "downtime" in the school day to do grading and lesson planning so she almost never brought home work as a result.

I took it to heart. It worked very, very well for me in college. I'd always have homework with me ready to go and when I was waiting for a class to start, or any other short time with nothing to do, I'd do homework. I'd only get a bit done at a time but it really added up and reduced my take home workload considerably.

I think the effectiveness of this strategy also depends on how well you can context switch. For some it is a lot easier than others.

I was bad at context switching too but if you really put your mind to it and put in the effort it can be learned. It does get easier with time. For people that it doesn't come naturally to (like me) it takes a lot of willpower to work like this but the payoff is huge.

I had a total of 3 hours a day on a bus to/from high school. I wish I could have done homework during that time!

But you know how spine-jarring school busses are. Maybe if I'd been able to complete it on a laptop instead of worksheets.

But nah, with how I was treated by folks on my bus, my laptop would've been tossed out the window the second day.

I've often wondered about those that commuted long ways for school. Was it because the school was better, or because there was no closer school? If it was just a better school, do you think it was more beneficial overall to have that time used on the bus when it could have been put to work on something else, or was the local school unsafe?

I was lucky enough to always live very close to my schools, so hours spent commuting to school is entirely alien to me, and barring safety issues, I'm not sure a directed extracurricular learning program wouldn't be more beneficial (and if the student or parents care enough to commute, I imagine they could work out some program from available sources). Then again, I've never been put in a situation that young where it relied that much on my own motivation.

It was a magnet school that had resources (one of the best performing arts departments in the state; one of the only AP comp sci programs in a 45 mi radius) that my locally assigned high school did not.

The primary reasons the school-bus commute was long was a) meandering suburbia with only 1-2 students per stop and b) a 20 mile trek on the highway at 45mph.

If I had been able to drive (or carpooled), my commute would have been less than 35 minutes.

> It was a magnet school that had resources

I guess that makes sense. It's not just "better" in the sense of different schools in an area may be better or worse, but also highly directed in certain areas. I can see the draw of that.

> meandering suburbia with only 1-2 students per stop

Yes, come to think of it, people that rode the bus at my school probably had at least a 40-45 minute ride in the earlier stops just from this. I think I rode the bus once when going to a friend's house after school, so this didn't come to mind. The rest of the time I always walked (High School was literally across the street from my house, Middle School was a 20 minute brisk walk). Like I said, alien.

Thanks for your explanation. :)

Gym teachers don't need to grade papers. Planning probably doesn't take too long for them either.

Especially true for nurses. Very tough job, but there's more money in it than many realize. My friend who already does well for himself is now going to do 1 more year of school to get a CRNA and says he'll likely make 160k in Miami or 220k in SF. Yet a co-worker asked "how can nurses survive here?" SF nurse salaries are public and you can see they can out earn most engineers esp via overtime (which lots of engineers work uncompensated). Still, nursing is a very tough job and can have a low status stigma.

My mother's actually a nurse, and it's been a really great career choice for her, especially as she's aged. Over the last five years or so my parents have had to move several times due to volatility in my dad's career. And yet at every move my mom hasn't had any trouble finding stable and well-paid employment as a nurse.

Nursing is similar to teaching in that you're not likely to get rich off of it, and it's not even an easy job at all, but it is a very stable one which pays a solid middle-class wage for life in pretty much any area of the country, from huge cities to small rural towns in the midwest. And, while the hours are rough as a new nurse fresh out of school, they're not bad at all with experience -- certainly it's a far more family friendly career than many others in healthcare, like being a physician.

If my mom had been a programmer, she definitely wouldn't have weathered the moves they've made as well as she has. In fact, she'd have been the one forcing my dad to move with her, as decent programming jobs simply do not exist where they live.

They may leave at 3:20, but that doesn't mean they are done working. Teachers do lots of work -- lesson planning, grading, etc. -- out of the classroom and outside of "working" hours. Not to mention the money they spend on basic supplies for their job that aren't provided by their employer -- or the time they sirens trying to solicit other people to find that.

Comments like the parent is why our teachers are undervalued. In my younger years, my roommate was a high school math teacher. And the soccer coach. He traveled a lot with the team and drove the bus, stayed late for practices, went in early to to supervise for safety...At nights when he comes home, he comes home tired, passes out, wakes up and grades papers.

Not all, but the one in my example did, and many do: http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=High_School_Teacher/...

I am sure that by getting a master's degree, teaching in private schools, being in certain states or cities, teaching classes that are in great demand, etc., teachers can reach higher salaries. But I think we can agree that by becoming teachers in the first place, they pretty much accepted the risk of never earning much.

Likewise, not all programmers in start-ups earn 40k, which is what the example was about.

Similarly, I thought I was rolling in the dough starting out at 65k as a developer right out of a 4 yr degree. Then I met an old friend in the same city who, after a couple years as an apprentice in a rural town, at 21y/o he's now making six figures as a plumber in the city/burbs.