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The starting pay sucks, it's not a breadwinner type of career. I would say 85 to 90 percent of the teachers I know either live with a roommate, live at home with their parents or are married to someone who is making more money.
The starting pay sucks, it's not a breadwinner type of career. I would say 85 to 90 percent of the teachers I know either live with a roommate, live at home with their parents or are married to someone who is making more money.
That has been my experience too.
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Are you kidding? It's kindergarten! What do kids need to learn? Numbers, letters, and how to use crayons...that's about it. Done very easily in about 30min/day over a few months. The rest of the time is wasted, as usual in school. I know this because I homeschool all four of my children, who are now miles ahead of the public school children. The public schools in this country are a disgrace. The homosexual content, same sex couple acceptance and "other" content that teachers are throwing at our children is criminal! I am sorry if this hurts your feelings, but teaching kindergarten IS little more than babysitting! Why should you make as much as a doctor, engineer, scientist, or even nurse? You work 9 months out of 12, make more than nurses, emt's, and firefighters! The government benefits, time off, and forgiven school loans as well as inflated salary is a complete waste too. I have yet to see a public school that provided a quality education. I for one am tired of paying taxes for teachers and schools that serve as babysitters for all my neighbors children. But more than that I am tired of these overpaid babysitters whining about how they don't make enough!
Sorry but teachers should make about 3/4 of what other service positions make...aprox $28-32k, INCLUDING benefits. Most nurses I know make around $50k, but have crap benefits with high deductible health insurance, while a teacher makes the same with great insurance, early retirement, and receives 3 months off a year! Does that sound equivalent? To make it even worse, is the fact that nurses actually work!
Here's the solution for you:
Get a teaching certificate and join the gravy train. Teaching's a piece of cake. Just like you mentioned. Anyone can do it. Money for nothing.
Possibly where you live there are nurses making $75k but not at any hospital where I live. Max for an RN in the hospital is around $65k, with 30 years experience. Yes most of them are hourly, but many are salary too.
You work for the wrong hospital. Keep in mind Missouri has the lowest paid state employees in the country. So, this is the absolute rock bottom pay in the entire country and state nurses are not paid less in your state. And, as pointed out by the article, Missouri state employees are the bottom of the entire industry in nearly every industry, including public and private workers.
Again, these are the lowest paid state employees in the country in a state that pays less than private industry across the board. There are plenty of other RNs making less than this kind of money, but clearly the more experienced RNs are making plenty high salaries. (And note that these are just their salaries/pay rates, not their take home pay. Read the 4 month take home pay in the details, and you will see that their take home pay is consistently on pace to be $80k-$120k because of overtime.)
Are you kidding? It's kindergarten! What do kids need to learn? Numbers, letters, and how to use crayons...that's about it. Done very easily in about 30min/day over a few months. The rest of the time is wasted, as usual in school. I know this because I homeschool all four of my children, who are now miles ahead of the public school children. The public schools in this country are a disgrace. The homosexual content, same sex couple acceptance and "other" content that teachers are throwing at our children is criminal! I am sorry if this hurts your feelings, but teaching kindergarten IS little more than babysitting! Why should you make as much as a doctor, engineer, scientist, or even nurse? You work 9 months out of 12, make more than nurses, emt's, and firefighters! The government benefits, time off, and forgiven school loans as well as inflated salary is a complete waste too. I have yet to see a public school that provided a quality education. I for one am tired of paying taxes for teachers and schools that serve as babysitters for all my neighbors children. But more than that I am tired of these overpaid babysitters whining about how they don't make enough!
Sorry but teachers should make about 3/4 of what other service positions make...aprox $28-32k, INCLUDING benefits. Most nurses I know make around $50k, but have crap benefits with high deductible health insurance, while a teacher makes the same with great insurance, early retirement, and receives 3 months off a year! Does that sound equivalent? To make it even worse, is the fact that nurses actually work!
Sarah, a suggestion from the mod for this forum - When you post on a forum where the majority of the posters are teachers, it's considered rude to insult them. I doubt you would like it if anyone posted on a nurses forum and said that nurses were mean, inefficient and overpaid. This is from the terms of service, that we all agreed to when we signed up:
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Leave wiggle room for dialogue, others may not see things the same as you, or been there as long as you, and any one of us can be wrong. Pouncing on someone you disagree with runs contrary to the spirit of this board and its members. We are here to help each other.
Are you kidding? It's kindergarten! What do kids need to learn? Numbers, letters, and how to use crayons...that's about it. Done very easily in about 30min/day over a few months. The rest of the time is wasted, as usual in school. I know this because I homeschool all four of my children, who are now miles ahead of the public school children. The public schools in this country are a disgrace. The homosexual content, same sex couple acceptance and "other" content that teachers are throwing at our children is criminal! I am sorry if this hurts your feelings, but teaching kindergarten IS little more than babysitting! Why should you make as much as a doctor, engineer, scientist, or even nurse? You work 9 months out of 12, make more than nurses, emt's, and firefighters! The government benefits, time off, and forgiven school loans as well as inflated salary is a complete waste too. I have yet to see a public school that provided a quality education. I for one am tired of paying taxes for teachers and schools that serve as babysitters for all my neighbors children. But more than that I am tired of these overpaid babysitters whining about how they don't make enough!
Sorry but teachers should make about 3/4 of what other service positions make...aprox $28-32k, INCLUDING benefits. Most nurses I know make around $50k, but have crap benefits with high deductible health insurance, while a teacher makes the same with great insurance, early retirement, and receives 3 months off a year! Does that sound equivalent? To make it even worse, is the fact that nurses actually work!
I can read between Sarah's lines: "miles ahead" = "they don't know all that scary evil stuff like evolution and the fact that gay people exist because I've been shielding them from things like... you know... reality"
I work 40 hours/week in the IT field. College degree? Nope. But I make 70k and my first-grade-teacher wife makes 38k - which, of course, required a four-year degree. Even with 'summers off' (summers for the students are 12 weeks, and my wife works one week past the last day of school, and two weeks before the first day of school, not to mention teaching a three-week 'bridges to kindergarten' course at half her usual pay - so her 'summer' isn't the three months that people like you who peddle the "teachers are lazy!" lie make it out to be) we work about the same amount of total hours (she goes in before the required 07:30 start and usually stays after the 15:30 end of her nominal shift, and occasionally goes in on weekends) but that's only because she's taught first grade for 8 years and has built up a large personally-tailored trove of lesson plans. Next year she moves to kindergarten full-time, and will be working more hours than me again as she builds her new lesson plan inventory from scratch - again, at barely half my pay and with more requirements. Oh, and my 401k with company matching blows away her 503b plan, my health plan is better, virtually all the benefits of my job are better - so much for the coddled teacher's union garbage we hear so much about from the usual suspects who find public education to be a convenient political target.
But worst of all for my wife? She has to put up with parents who are every bit as profoundly ignorant as you.
Sarah, do you see that embarrassing (you should be embarrassed over it, even though anyone who could write such pathetic nonsense obviously won't be) bit you wrote in red? Here's the equivalent of that: "Nursing? Put on a bandage, change a diaper, hand out painkillers...that's about it."
Ponder that for a moment. Yeah, you essentially wrote that about teachers.
Oh, and my 401k with company matching blows away her 403b plan
An inflation adjusted savings bond blows away most 403b plans. No matching with the return of a tax sheltered annuity and the fees of a mutual fund. When my wife taught, the fees on her 403(b) were 2%+ annually on a 5-6% return annuity with no match (before inflation). And that was on top of a 7-15% load fee! Obviously we did not put a cent into it and just put more money into her IRA instead.
I've been involved in these teaching/nursing "discussions" before. First let me say, do not believe these websites that tell you that "average" nursing salaries are $70-$80K/yr. That is an average of all nursing salaries, including Nurse Practitioners, Nurse Anesthetists, Nurse Midwives, etc who serve as physician extenders. I read somewhere recently that someone, maybe the BLS is starting to divide nursing salaries into groups, to make up for this confounding.
I live in Colorado, not a low COL state. I'm posting some salaries from Denver Health, one of the big hospitals in Denver, also not a low COL city in this state. I'd post more, but most of the other hospitals don't list salaries on their websites. https://careers.peopleclick.com/care...caleCode=en-us
You can check all the nursing jobs, they all seem to show the same salary schedule, from what I've seen.
Believe me when I tell you a new grad will start at the minimum, which works out to ~$52K/yr for working 12 months a year, with probably 10 holidays (some of which will be worked) and 10 vacation days. The max, which you might reach in 40 years, is ~$82K/yr. You might get a few more vacation days by then as well.
To get back on topic a bit, teaching did a good thing when it made a bachelor's degree the entry into profession requirement a century ago or so. Nursing should do the same.
It's early (only two pages in), but it looks like most of the people who have posted receive a decent amount of sick leave and PTO. I just find it interesting because part of these discussions always compare hours worked, time off, etc.
I usually stay out of these kinds of discussions because there really is no point. The people that say teachers get a lot of time off and are paid well typically have little to no experience in a classroom other than as a student. So, they do not truly understand the requirements and obstacles in teaching and preparing students for the future.
They look at the listed school hours and remember that, as students, they had summers and holidays off and got out of school at about 3:00 pm, so assume that teachers worked similar hours. But that is far from the truth. Most teachers get to work at least 30-45 minutes before the kids come into the classroom in order to make sure everything is ready for the day, provide extra tutoring for students, meet with parents that cannot come during normal hours or after school, etc. And most stay, at minimum, 2-3 hours after dismissal...and many an hour or two longer than that, especially new teachers. This is not because they just love spending all their time at school, it's because staff meetings take place after school (and usually take at least 1 1/2 - 2 hours).
Now those staff meetings may occur only one day a week, but depending on if grade level meetings are required, may also take place 2-3 days a week...usually after school. All this taking time away from the actual planning and prepping that the teacher has to do. After school is the only time you can prepare your class for lessons that you are planning, rearrange desks and seating charts to try and minimize student distractions and keep students from getting bored and complacent, load/type lessons on the smartboard or other technologies used, get equipment needed, make copies (which can take much longer than you would think, particularly in a school with a limited number of copy machines), and many other tasks that cannot be completed during instruction time or at home.
When most teachers finally go home, they have to plan future lessons (which may require a lot of research), determine how they are going to assess the students' knowledge on those lessons, then create those assessments, and once the assignment is done, grade the assessments.
And that's just a few of the basic requirements. It doesn't even touch on classroom management, which differs greatly from class to class, year to year, day to day, and even minute to minute. CM is one of the most challenging parts of the job, and one that someone that has never been in charge of a classroom could possibly fully comprehend. Nor does it talk about the difficulty of having an autistic student (or any student with any type special needs) in your class. Not only does the teacher have to find a way to differentiate their instruction for the different learning styles, knowledge base, effort level, support at home, etc., but they have to make sure they understand the needs of those students with some sort of mental or emotional handicap, and that oftentimes means doing extra research and reading to understand how to best help and teach those students.
Oh, and the summer thing, well teachers DO NOT get paid for that time. The only issue is whether the teacher takes their pay in 10 months or 12...but that's a distribution issue, and doesn't change the annual salary. So, a teacher making 40K a year (which takes about 7 years to reach in my state) makes roughly 3300/month over a 12 months period. And while teachers do not get paid during that time, most have to spend many hours preparing for the new school year. If there have been changes in the curriculum (which happens far to frequently), they have to begin preparing to teach the new curriculum by researching the changes, and plan for the new approach. Additionally, they often have to take seminars, attend professional development, and many other job related activities in order to prepare for the new school year.
And that's just the beginning.
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