

Just How Much Are America's Teachers Getting Paid? - cwan
http://www.businessinsider.com/american-teacher-pay-2010-10

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dbingham
The author of this article has clearly never been a teacher. The teacher has,
on average 5 hours a day in the classroom.

The really bad ones, however, will put in another 3 hours a day in prep work,
grading, staying up to date on their topic, leading extracurriculars,
meetings, etc. For the good ones it will be much more. The average teacher
actually spends much closer to 10 or 12 hours a day working, and often puts in
a few hours on the weekend catching up on grading and preparation to boot.

Let's recalculate his numbers, just assuming a more realistic number of work
hours. We'll assume 8 hours a day five days a week - the bad teacher minimum.
That brings it down to $43 an hour. For the absolute minimum amount of work.
Before pension and benefits and all that.

Let's check for a good teacher. I had teachers who would come in at 6 am to do
prep work and leave the school at 6 pm after extra curricular activities
nearly every day. And they didn't really have lesson prep time in all of that,
which adds another 4 to 6 hours on. Their hours could easily reach 16 a day,
we'll use 12 ave (which is probably too low for many). And now we're down to
$29 an hour. For a 60 hour work week.

This post is disingenous at worse and at best shows a complete lack of
understanding of what it takes to be a teacher. I recommend the author try
being a teacher, or at least interview some teachers about the amount of time
they put into their job, before arguing that they are paid too much.

