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Comment by justinph | Hacker News Reader

I take great umbrage with his graph depicting teachers both as relatively high paid and not working that hard. He says he's been a teacher, but given the plot on the graph, I highly doubt it. It's way harder than you think, and unless you're a tenured professor at a university, teachers make shit.

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I've never taught high school, but I'm a grad student and teach freshmen, so I have some experience. A few observations:

1) The first time you teach a class, it's incredibly hard and time consuming, but the difficulty drops like a logarithm to a relatively low plateau after you've done it a few times.

2) At one point I thought about teaching high school English. Seattle Public Schools paid $36K / yr with a Masters or $30K / yr without starting, and those numbers topped at around $70K and $55K after 30 years (IIRC, Bellevue Public School teachers made something like ~10K more). That doesn't count retirement; teaching is unusual because a lot of the benefits are backloaded in the form of retirement pay. One woman in my grad program taught English for 26 years in Michigan and took an early retirement offer; I think she gets 70% of her last year's salary for life. Granted, those deals are going away because of the budget crisis, but a lot of the retirement stuff is still baked in.

3) You can multiply those numbers by 1.2 or so because teachers only have mandatory work for nine months of the year.

4) After two to three years, you effectively can't be fired because of union rules (unless you sleep with a student and get caught in a flagrant manner, don't show up, etc.). See this post: http://jseliger.com/2009/11/12/susan-engel-doesnt-get/ for lots of citations on that, as well as a lot of the information that's going into this comment. This has value. PG figured this out: "Economic statistics are misleading because they ignore the value of safe jobs. An easy job from which one can't be fired is worth money; exchanging the two is one of the commonest forms of corruption. A sinecure is, in effect, an annuity." http://paulgraham.com/ladder.html .

Note: there are major downsides to teaching. You have to like working with relatively undeveloped people (if you're teaching high school) or children (if you're teaching elementary school). In teaching, it's very hard to make substantially more money if you really want to; whether you're a good or bad teacher isn't likely to make you more money.

My big impression is that teaching isn't going to make you rich, but you're also unlikely to ever be poor. To say that "teachers make shit" isn't really true. It is to true to say that teachers have back-loaded compensation packages that tend to be high in benefits (e.g. good health care, retirement) and low in upfront salary.

My smaller impression is that most teachers I had didn't seem to work that hard after their first three - four years of teaching.

I'd say that "teachers make shit for knowledge workers". Yeah, they're not going to the poorhouse (provided they can find a job in the first place and get entrenched), and there are a lot of problems with union contracts, but if you're educated enough to get a masters and good enough at teaching/politics to make it through the first few years, you probably could've made more money elsewhere.

As a high school teacher, how hard you work is entirely up to you. There are some teachers who bust their asses and let the job suck up their whole lives, because they're so emotionally invested in how well the kids do. There are others who show up as late as they're allowed, leave as early as they're allowed, and don't get stressed out by anything. They're paid the same. Exactly the same.

Teachers do ok, and as a teacher I can say it's not a hard job. Not a lot of fun but not hard.

Maybe you're doing it wrong? Why don't you put out more effort and make it fun. Or find something else where you are willing to do so. (I am a former high school teacher.)

At the risk of incurring much wrath, I have known a teacher (a friend) who did not work very hard 9 months out of the year, and then didn't work at all the other three months. I also have a friend, a teacher, who spends significant time not merely grading papers, but improving her curricula, knowledge, and teaching skills. She does so 9 months out of the year. I am not trying to belittle the work that teachers do, but there is a significant amount of time that many teachers are not working. I would assume that is a significant reason for the dot's location on the graph.

The problem is the $$$ plot point. Grade school teachers (in the US) are not well paid. Which is why it attracts the lazy people instead of the ones who would actually put out the effort needed to properly educate our youth. (Not meant to be an indictment of all teachers, just the "bad ones".)

It very much depends where you are a teacher. In Canada, especially in Ontario, it is a really high paying job that is relatively easy due to the strength of the teacher's union.

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