Of course, tax payers most likely footed the bill for her to come up with those lesson plans.
2) Even if taxpayers do pay teacher salaries, they do so using local tax revenue for educating students in their respective state and municipality. Once this lesson content is consumed by students and teaching is complete, what is the benefit of the taxpayer usurping this content, and for what purpose?
In reality teachers usually work long hours in dedication to their profession and their students, and do so for far less money than most professionals with that workload.
If the lessons plans are good enough for a huge numbers of teachers to drop $700k on them, you can damn well bet they were developed with a huge investment of personal time. Either that, or the teacher is a fricking genius.
Either way, I don't think there's anyway to construe this as "the taxpayers are getting shafted on this employment contract."
- 4:45am, awake
- 5:30am, out the door
- 6:00am, gets to school
- 6-8 she does whatever needs done for classes, meets with students, meets with peers or administration
- 8:00am, classes begin
- 9:30am, break time for 1hr 30 minutes -- but students will come in during this time to either make up tests, get extra help with something, or just do work. She can also have meetings (again) with peers, administration or sometimes parents.
- 11:00am, lunch for 1hr -- but again, students will usually come in to do whatever they need to do.
- 12:00pm, next class
- 1:30pm, next class
- 3:00pm, school's out
- 3-5, meetings with peers, getting ready for class tomorrow, emailing parents, handling disciplinary issues, prints lesson plans or whatever else needs done at school
- 5:30pm, home
- 6:00pm, eat and take a nap for however long she can get
- 8:00pm, wake up from nap, grade papers, enter in grades (if grades aren't posted online within 2 days she'll get about 5 emails a day from parents asking about it)
- 10:00pm, gets ready for bed
- 11:30pm, can finally get to sleep due to thinking/preparing for the next day.
She gets paid $36,000 a year. I have so much respect for her. Oh, I forgot to tell you -- all her lesson plans change each semester. They don't have books in half their classes -- they use a county wide "lesson plan" which must be printed out for each student. The school system believes in "evolving" education, so every semester they try to incorporate different topics or try to approach different methodologies. While I commend them for that, it negatively effects the teachers in excess busy work. If they used a printed book for 10 years in a row, she'd do it once and be done, with variations being in classes taught.
Suggest using those meetings with colleagues to explore team planning. Leverage a good lesson by using it with more classes at same level/subject.
Assessment ('grading' in American): any scope for MCQ or self/peer assessment?
Better numbers can be found at http://www.bls.gov/data/
Total compensation per hour for elementary/secondary school teachers: 56.59 (and avg wage is 38.39); far higher than any other public position (save administrators - they get cake too).
Starting teacher salary in my district is $42,000 per year for a 187-day contract. Assuming the teachers only work 7 hours a day (which is insultingly low; my first year teaching I worked 60-70 hours a week): 42000 / 7 * 187 = $32.09 per hour.
I think if you (wrongly, IMO) assume that all teachers in America work only the hours that they're on the clock in front of children, then MAYBE that number is believable. But that's not the reality of the teaching profession, in my experience.
Edit: I see that number is "total compensation", which presumably includes health care and such. I don't know how to meaningfully add that to my estimate, but it would certainly increase it.
They also don't get any benefits from FICA and medicare. That pension they pay into is supposed to cover all of that but costs more than FICA and Medicare.
And much like a teacher "gets off work at 3pm" they do in fact work year round. They may not be in the classroom, but in the summer they are usually going to workshops and conferences and doing long term lesson planning for the coming year.
Fact remains that most lesson planning involves repurposing old material. It is never from a clean slate and now with testing pushed so much there is little time for a flexible curriculum. How many times are you going to rewrite the fractions lesson?
Next response will state that teachers actually work more than 365 days a year as they have mastered time travel. I respect teachers, but blind statements that they work so much actually does more harm than good. Work smart, not hard. Which is why people are buying lesson plans than writing their own. And going on vacation instead of that boring workshop.
If I 'teach' the lesson, not very often.
If I want each and every student to understand the concept of proportion, and each student be able to use fractions and ratios effectively, I'll need to adjust the presentation, sequence, style and approach a lot of times, quite possibly on the fly in the classroom.
Now, how many programming languages and code libraries do we really need?
No.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
I wish I understood why this myth was so pervasive.
In other words, although other professions are as likely to work from home or other places, it fails to mention the amount of hours that teachers DO work outside the office - at least the good ones that actually care. In the same breath there are many teachers who just skate by because they know they won't get fired.
The essay also doesn't take into account the length of a teachers workday nor the nature of the work. When my wife taught she had to arrive at 6:30am and often didn't get home until 4:30 or 5:00pm on a good day. Have you ever tryed to entertain twenty 7-year-olds for 10 hours? It's pretty exhausting - not to mention the fact that they also have to deal with the administration requirements, parents, standardized testing, other bad teachers that never will lose their jobs, etc. All for 34k per year before taxes.
Say it's 11:23am and you need to use the restroom. Sorry, you can't exactly just walk out of class to run down the hall. You have to wait until your 20 minute lunch break which includes walking the kids to and from the lunchroom.
Just to give some perspective, this is such a problem where we live that that I know or know of nearly a dozen teachers no longer in the classroom or looking for other employment.
For those teachers who feel they are living the life, I'd love to know where they live because from where I sit summers odd is about the best thing going for teachers.
It helps to read a report all the way to paragraph 2 before determining it is garbage.
"Because of the way in which the data are collected, it is possible to identify and quantify the work that teachers do at home, at a workplace, and at other locations and to examine the data by day of the week and time of day"
It's possible you work more than average, in which case there are others who who work less than average. Or perhaps you just overestimate the work you put in (same as most people do).
I've worked in public education for fifteen years, and I know almost no teachers who work as little as the "average" quoted in the BLS results.
But then I work for a "good" school (top 100 in my State, nearly top 1000 in the US). I suspect the difference between the data (which I'm sure is accurate) and my experience boils down to "Good teachers work a lot of hours. Many (most?) of the teachers in America are not good."
If you do, ask them how many hours per day they have set aside to create lesson plans, and grade papers.
Then ask them how much money out of their own pocket they have spent buying supplies for their classroom.
If the teachers you know are paid to create lesson plans, are paid to grade papers, and do get a sufficient budget for school supplies, then please tell me where you live, so that I can tell the teachers that I know to move there.
When I write code as part of my employment, I don't own the copyright for that code. Do teachers actually own the copyright to their lesson plans if the lesson plan is an expected product of their job?