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In an ideal world…

This isn’t really related to writing (although it touches upon what I mentioned in a recent post), but I’m about to return to teaching and this caught my eye.

Some say that teachers are glorified ‘babysitters.’ If this is the case, then teachers should be paid per child, and by the hour. Let’s be generous and give a rate of $2 an hour, when most childcare services charge anywhere from $5-$9. For $2 an hour, multiplied by the national average of 30 students per classroom, this is $60 an hour. Teachers work 8 hour days, so $60 X 8 hours = $480 per day. Teachers work 5 days a week, so $480 X 5 days = $2400 a week. Teachers on average are in the classroom 40 weeks out of the year. So $2400 X 40 weeks = $96,000.

$96,000 is what a teacher would be paid if they were babysitters, and yet the average starting salary is around $23,000 ($442 a week). And despite all of this information, there are still many people who say that teachers are ‘overpaid’?

(these numbers were generated based on an hourly rate of $2 per hour, per student for the sake of simplicity of the example. What if teaches were paid the actual childcare rate of $5-$9? You would see the final cost of $96,000 balloon up to a possible maximum of $432,000 a year.)

Yes, people teach because they love learning and love their students.  But they shouldn’t have to put that ahead of their own children’s financial security.

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