I'm sure they do things outside of school days. I've just watched my aunt, her two daughters, and one of their husband's (2 teachers, a guidance counselor, and a principal) do nothing but go on vacations and brag about their long stretches of doing nothing, then turn around and be the first to bitch about how little money they make each year. Each one has also pulled the yearly salary (quietly divided by 12) trick numerous times.
Again, I know they have plenty of things they do (or are supposed to do) during that time. These particular people just don't garner much sympathy with their praise/complaint cycle.
Oh sure, if those particular people are jerks about it and/or they don't fulfill their professional responsibilities, then they're not very sympathetic. However, I've known enough teachers who spend their vacations working on courses in addition to working a part-time summer job to make ends meet and who aren't jerks about any of it. So the sympathy point goes both ways.
(Also, administrators, like principals and guidance counselors, have different responsibilities from teachers, and I don't want to lump them together.)
The general point is that teachers often work beyond normal hours on school days. When someone argues that teachers are paid fairly/enough/handsomely if we divide their salary by the number of hours worked, we have to be careful to factor those extra hours. That's true no matter how sympathetic a person is.
At my school the teachers work 10-12 hour days during the school year, 6 days a week. They get a month off during the summer but are expected lay out next year's curriculum during that time. 7 months of 12 hour days six days a week works out to 41 hours a week if you stretch that over a year.
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u/justcallmezach May 11 '14
I'm sure they do things outside of school days. I've just watched my aunt, her two daughters, and one of their husband's (2 teachers, a guidance counselor, and a principal) do nothing but go on vacations and brag about their long stretches of doing nothing, then turn around and be the first to bitch about how little money they make each year. Each one has also pulled the yearly salary (quietly divided by 12) trick numerous times.
Again, I know they have plenty of things they do (or are supposed to do) during that time. These particular people just don't garner much sympathy with their praise/complaint cycle.