As far as underpaid and overworked the starting salary for a first year teacher is $45,000 for a 180 days a year , they also get full medical/dental and a pension plan and full tuition reimbursment for additional educational credits. This is for a 22 or 23 year old who has not yet achieved their masters degree.
May be true where you live, but that's not true everywhere, and you should walk a mile in their shoes before casting aspersions on teachers anywhere. My salary for my last year of teaching was $49,000 and that was with a master's degree PLUS thirty hours and 29 years of experience. NONE of the courses I took during all those summers to keep my teacher's license renewed were reimbursed, and those six weeks of courses were on that "off time" that didn't factor into your 180 days of work. We also had 10 additional workdays in addition to the 180 teaching days, and we were on call all hours during that 190 day contract year. On days of parent conferences, for example, we were there from 7:30 a.m. to 8 at night, and we are at work many nights by sponsoring clubs, chaparoning dances, meetings with textbook representatives or state accreditation personnel, travelling with the bad or chorus - all on our own time and after school hours.
And teaching school for me was not a job I could turn off when I walked out the back door to my car. The problems of the children stayed with me constantly. One also had prepration at home for future lessons and tests, papers to grade, grades to average, parents to contact, all off the clock. There was always something to do during the school year. And many things for my classroom for students' use were paid for out of my own pocket. Tight school budgets didn't go very far in providing any extras.
Now, I LOVED benefits of being a state employee - the health insurance (dental only covers about 45 % of my cost), the holidays.
But to deal with 100 different child personalities with double the number of parent personalities in a typical school year, you HAD to love doing it and not for the money. The best teachers are professionals who are usually not treated like professionals and certainly are not paid on the same scale as professionals with similar education and experience.
