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Comment by ccccccccccccc | Hacker News Reader

$50,000 is on the higher end of the spectrum for teachers. In Texas, the starting teacher salary is around $38,000. Plus, teachers have to provide their own supplies, be at the school by 7 am every day, stay late helping with extracurriculars / helping students, and work late grading among other things.

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Seeing closer to $42k here: https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/community/northeast...

That's another thing as well, there's the line that teachers have to provide their own supplies. But the degree to which is left up to the teacher.

And then there's the months off.

I'm pretty orthogonal to it now considering my wife is an elementary school teacher. And there is a degree of truth to the complaints, but they are often exaggerated as well. She still complains about how much I work.

The median personal and household incomes in 2016 were $31k and $59k, so at $38k you're starting your career well ahead of the median for US citizens of all ages. I happen to think teachers should be paid much more because of the importance of what they do, i.e. I think they're paid less than their potential worth, but I don't think it makes sense to paint teachers as low-earners in an absolute sense. Unless the point is that the median american is a low-earner in an absolute sense, which is fair enough.

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p... https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...

So don't do it.

If I found myself continually grousing about my low pay relative to other professions, and all of the indignities and hardships I suffered, I'd find another job.

Yeah you have 3 months out of the year to prep and job search.

Ok role playing time. Your a teacher. You majored in some subject like music or English. You probably spent 4-5 years in school. Maybe you have some debt. Your working as a teacher right now making 45k. What do you do? Getting an education in something useful could take 4 years + debt. You could goto trade school , 2 years?

So the average teacher's starting salary is more than 30% higher than the average person's salary in Texas.

I understand that teaching isn't a highly paid profession, but when you only work ~75% of the year, that doesn't seem so terrible...

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