Teachers Don't Get Paid to Sit Around On Their Butts All Summer - A Guest Rant by Dede Pazour

Dede is a gifted teacher with whom I was honored to teach in my first two years in education.  She taught 6th grade Language Arts with a passionate fury that never tired.  I will never forget the way she held her students captivated at the edges of their seats for 47 minutes straight every day, radiating her love for the written word and genuinely warm affection for each child.  She now works as a Teacher-Librarian and has been known to pack a crowded house at lunch time as students flock to the library for book club.  When Dede was told by a neighbor that teachers have it easy, she had this to say...

Let me clarify something…

Teachers do NOT get paid to sit around on their butts all summer as my neighbor just so charmingly insinuated.  We do not actually get paid for the summer months at all.  We do get paid IN the summer months.  This is how it works.  Teachers are generally contracted to work anywhere from 175-250 days of the year, depending on the district and the instructional program.  Our salary scales move in two directions: vertically (years of experience teaching) and horizontally (hours of education or completion of degree programs beyond the bachelor’s degree required to be a public school teacher, i.e. masters and doctorates).  We can only go so far vertically before we reach the ceiling of what we can earn, so the only way to receive raises is to continuously take classes and/or complete educational programs to learn how to better support and teach children.  This results in a LOT of student loans.  It makes sense that educators are life-long learners.  We model what we teach.

So, back to the paycheck in the summer…  Simple.  They take our total salary and divide into 12 increments so we don’t have to budget for the months that school is not in session.  This means that we have more time to attend those classes we need to take so we can be better teachers AND try to make enough money to pay our mortgages and (in an O. Henry-like twist) our student loans.  For the past two summers, I took a total of 20 graduate credits and effectively didn’t see the light of day.  I didn’t get to “sit around doing nothing” because I was too busy trying to decide which gargantuan research paper I was going to stay up writing each night.

Teachers are highly educated professionals who are not given the respect or compensation of similarly qualified people in other lines of work.  A teacher is required to have a bachelor’s degree and must complete a number of college credits every five years to renew the teaching license.  The average salary of a teacher in Colorado is $48,621.80 (Colorado Department of Education http://www.cde.state.co.us/cdereval/download/PDF/2010Staff/1AverageTeacherSalaries2010.pdf Retrieved 6/14/2011.)  “Simply Hired, which projects average pay based upon information in hiring announcements, places the average garbage collector pay at $43,000 as of Nov. 19, 2010.” (The Average Garbage Man Salary | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/info_7736611_average-garbage-man-salary.html#ixzz1PJ38LQXC Retrieved 6/14/2011.)  Thank heavens for the people who remove our garbage!  It’s strenuous, noxious work, but it does NOT require an expensive college degree, many hours of continuing education, piles of paperwork, and the constant scrutiny by and accountability to parents, administrators, and the community at large (nor discarder/refuse engineer conferences, for which I’m sure they don’t realize how lucky they are!).

While I’m often told, to my face, “Teachers don’t get paid nearly enough!  I could NEVER do what you do,” voters in many school districts consistently say otherwise when they vote against mill levies, which are ballot measures that would improve teacher compensation.  People argue that teachers “only work from 8:00am-3:00pm and have summers off, so what are they complaining about?”  If teachers only worked the hours they were contracted to work, papers would rarely be graded, lessons and units would be haphazard affairs pulled off of the internet during 25-42 minute plan periods, and class periods would be glorified babysitting hours.  I’m here to tell you that is NOT what is happening in your public school classrooms.

Teachers are staying at school until 6:00, 7:00, 8:00pm, are coming in to their school buildings over the weekends, are grading papers during dinner, are meeting with each other during their “unpaid, non-contracted lunch hour” (20 minutes), and are putting on dog and pony shows to keep kids passionate about learning.  We’re talking about kids who are often so spoiled by the instant gratification of TV and the Internet that they have the attention spans of Jack Russell terriers who’ve gotten into the coffee grounds OR they come from homes with no educational support and are operating with such a deficit that it’s all we can do to find a way to scaffold learning to bring them up to speed. They want color splashes, sound bites, videos, computers, technology, graphics, and events so current that they haven’t even happened yet.  If we can’t keep them entertained, they check out.  Meanwhile, we have to address state mandated standards of learning, which, honestly, are well-intentioned, but it’s a LOT to do in a few short hours each day.

THEN we test this dynamic style of learning by Supergluing them to their seats, in complete silence, three hours a day, for two solid weeks, in front of a test booklet with questions like, “If you were to select one person to commemorate by placing them [sic] on a postage stamp, who would it be, and why?”  REALLY?  And no, we’re not allowed to explain what a postage stamp is, though, in the age of email and Facebook, it’s about as current and relevant to them as a monocle or pair of spats.  The kids fret so much about not understanding the question that they can’t even begin to answer it.  Scores come back and it turns out the schools with middle-class and wealthy kids from homes with educated parents do quite well on the tests, and children from impoverished homes, or with uneducated parents, do poorly.  Yes, there are exceptions, but let’s not nickel and dime my rant, okay?  We could save hundreds of teachers’ jobs from the chopping block by eliminating the many millions of dollars that we spend on standardized testing and just assign students a score based on their parents’ income tax returns and diplomas/degrees or lack thereof.  Having more teachers means there would be fewer students in each class and THAT has consistently proven to be the ONE thing that improves learning for students of ALL backgrounds.  Incidentally, the neighbor who insulted me and started this rant was one of the people who helped to design the multi-million dollar CSAP.  ‘Nuff said.

Teachers work their butts off, so if they occasionally choose to sit on them for a few moments to rest, give them a break.  God knows, they’ve earned it!