5 Responses to “How Can I Increase My Salary?”

1. joanne boyd says:

   August 16, 2006 at 12:28 pm

   I have been teaching for 23 years and I never heard of some of
   these “bonuses”, and I certainly pay Social Security taxes; don’t
   know anybody who doesn’t. Please be careful not to paint this job
   as some kind of dream job that makes the rest of the world suckers
   for supporting teachers. I feel sick when I read this site. One
   of the entries talked about 1923 salaries and conditions as if they
   were something to bring back. Teaching used to be a job that women
   took til they got married in this country. This is clearly not
   the case today. We are subject to cost of
   living increases and we want to send our kids to college and
   own homes and get recognition for our work like anyone else.
   We are not priests or nuns or saints; we are people who are
   choosing a job that everyone criticizes and seems to envy and
   begrudge paying us for, but nobody actually wants to do, and we are trying to educate your (and our) children. I want every one of you with a difficult
   teenager to imagine having 150 of them every year for your entire
   working life.
   Another entry compared teaching salaries to the way farmers are
   paid.I can’t imagine comparing teaching to sales or custodial
   work or nuclear physics. It’s a very different kind of work and
   the compensations will be different.Construction workers make a lot
   of money because it’s dangerous and seasonal work they do, and I
   have no problem with that. People seem to think it’s a
   “dollars =results” thing and unfortunately, it doesn’t work that
   way. We’re working with kids, not corn or phone book ads or vacuum
   cleaners. It’s an art more than a science,and maintaining teenagers’ interest and overcoming their hormones, home lives, apathy and sometimes dispassionate hatred is a daily, draining struggle that has at various times caused me to cry–not
   just for me, but for them–on my drive home, home where I will sit and
   grade papers or plan lessons for three to four more hours a night.
   I go in and “perform” daily for students who are often wonderful,
   which is why I stay with it, but who may insult me, break things
   in the classroom and beat up other kids simply because they had a
   bad day– or for darker reasons, such
   as being abused at home, having no place to sleep at night, being
   bullied and terrified by other children, or because they are the
   future Ted Bundy, serial killer or rapist that you read about in the
   papers. They all went to school, you know. They all had teachers
   who probably had a clue pretty early on that the kid would end up
   in the newspapers. Every fall I wonder if this is the year I will
   be shot by a student disgruntled because he failed a class or had
   a fight with his father.

   I love my job for the most part, but that is in spite of the
   constant emotional upheaval, the absolute lack of social life
   (English teachers do NOTHING but grade papers, believe me),the
   constant self-questioning I do about whether I have done the
   best I could for the kids, the beating myself up over the occas-
   ional times I have lost it and been impatient or sarcastic with
   a kid, the trying to work within a system that is always reinventing
   itself in an attempt to basically do the same thing, and often doing
   more harm than good, and the lack of understanding of this work
   that people have. I don’t think I make too much money. I make
   enough for what I do and for what I bring to the job, and what
   the job takes out of me.

   When I read vitriol that seems to paint this
   job as some simple minded work that anyone can do and has perks
   beyond measure, I wonder which schools these people are talking
   about. If it’s such a cake job, why do 50% of new teachers leave
   before they are there for five years? When I was younger, I thought
   the summer breaks were unnecessary but a nice aspect of the job; I
   taught summer school for a dozen years and worked waitressing
   and retail to supplement my
   $12,000 a year salary. But teaching takes a toll on you. I am a
   good teacher, and the years have made me better than I was,
   but I do not have the stamina for this that I had
   before, and I *need* the time to not have Kids in My Head for 24/7.
   In the summer my hair stops falling out, my ulcer subsides, and
   I can actually participate in my own life. And I work on school
   stuff regularly. Good teachers never stop thinking about things that
   will make their classes better, but during the school year, you are
   like a hamster on a wheel, desperately trying to keep up with
   the hundred-plus lives you are handed every September, lives that
   come with incredible baggage that you can’t possibly know about but
   are expected to be able to anticipate, and make that kid want to
   learn when all he cares about is not getting killed by the
   stepbrother that just got out of prison and is after him—-
   or he has an attitude that you have to spend half the year
   working on because his parents constantly talk about how easy
   teachers have it and how overpaid you are and what stupid books
   you are using in the classroom. Those are the kids who think it’s
   okay to hurl insults at their teachers and resent every attempt to
   be taught. When they fail their exams it is then my fault for
   not being able to overcome the attitude that the parents managed
   to instill. Nice job.

   I sound bitter, but the thing is, I’m an
   idealist. I know I could do wonderful things with all my troubled
   kids if I didn’t have so damn *many* of them. I don’t have enough
   time or energy to do everything this job requires and because I
   have a work ethic, it exhausts me. This is why teachers want fewer
   students. Teachers can’t really say anything about what would make
   the schools work because somehow if we had few enough students to
   really do our work right or better working conditions, people would
   accuse us of having it too easy. Somehow they already do think
   we have it too easy, so education will never get better, as far as
   I can tell. The job is too difficult to offer less money to teachers.
   Who would want to do it? They can’t get qualified teachers in the
   big city schools as it is, because THE JOB IS TOO HARD for most
   people. I’m not talking about affluent suburbs that produce lots of
   people who discuss educational issues in the paper and on blogs.
   It’s ironic that teachers in those schools get paid so much more
   when they have it so mucheasier. I’m talking about rural and urban
   schools where the social problems make the job of teaching a kid
   near to impossible, but the districts have little money to actually
   restructure families. Who’s going to go in and read to little kids
   at night, show them to appreciate nature and respect science ….
   this just makes me so tired.
2. Michele says:

   January 26, 2007 at 4:08 pm

   I have to agree 100% with Joanne’s comments. I am have taught in a public school for the last ten years and have never heard of most of the supposed benefits listed here. Free parking? You are really making quite a reach to paint teachers in as negative a light as possible. I pay the same rates for my mortgage, my daycare and my student loans as every other working American. It took me eight years to reach 30,000 a year. But I don’t complain. I love my job and I don’t feel badly that I have a week off at Christmas…so does my mother in law who has worked at the grocery store for 15 years and my best freind who is an accountant.
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