Yeah, I really think so. I even said it out loud in a room full of teachers and got yelled at. I think that teaching is definitely emotionally demanding, and it can be hard. Good teachers, I believe, are underpaid, but because the vast majority of schools are public, the market has been unable to work its magic on the profession. Unions keep bad, but competent, teachers working far longer than they should, and in my state, we get a tremendous pension. Just a stupid amount of pension. I can retire with full pension after the age of 46 if I buy out my first years, which is a comparatively trivial amount of money. Now, I haven't calculated that recently, the last time I did was in 2012 when I first started in public schools, and things have changed, but I'll basically be making 55k/year at full pension. And again, I could theoretically retire at 46 and have a new career, plus get a free 55 thousand a year, from the taxpayers, for doing nothing. And I live in the suburbs. I have a two bedroom apartment that I pay $520 a month for.

To start, teachers make around 40k/year, but unions have dictated pay raises go up regularly, significantly, and quickly. It's also dictated by education, where if you have more degrees, you get paid more. You're required to continue education as a teacher, so you will be adding on degrees just as part of your job. More pay raise. At some of the richer school districts, the most experienced teachers make above 90k a year. I'm not counting on that, but still. Okay, so there's what they make.

School starts at 8:15, ends at 3:15. That's 7 hours, but you're there early and late, so let's make it 9. Well, you have a lunch, so there's a half hour. You have at minimum one planning hour (though most people have two), which is TECHNICALLY work, but most people I know use it as facebook time. Still, let's say teachers are at school 9 hours a day.

Last week, I graded 140 short answer tests in 5 hours. This is the most grading you tend to give yourself. About 5 hours a week, and that's a bad week. 9 hours a day, plus 5 hours a week of grading. Sometimes you'll grade for 12 hours, morning until night, but that's usually after one really big project, and those don't come around as often, and to lessen the burden on students and yourself, right before that's due, little homework is assigned.

Now you need lessons. You have 5 classes (that you teach 6 times a day) next week, so you need lesson plans for those. In your first few years of teaching the subject, you will be making these up completely. It takes me about 90 minutes to make one up. Let's say 8 hours of lesson plans.

Okay, so that's a lot. 58 hours per week. That's a lot!

Well, no it isn't. That's on weeks where there's school every day.

People remember teachers get the summer off, plus get two weeks at Christmas, and Easter, and so on, but they forget how many school days there are.

180.

Literally 180 days of school. So let's say you work those 58 hours a week for 36 weeks a year, which is what it evens out to, that's 2208 hours. 40 hours per week at a 50 week job is 2000 hours. Assuming you blow another 50 hours planning during the summer, normalized to an entire year, you're looking at a 45 hour a week job with an insane pension plan and top notch benefits.

After a few years, that lesson planning drops off huge, and the job becomes significantly less than 40 hours per week. Also, if you plan your curriculum in a certain way, you never have to spend any time grading.

Ever wonder why in school, your teacher said "All right, now pass it to your neighbour and we'll grade them. Answer 1 is A." It's not to foster a sense of responsibility or elicit questions from the class, though it does do that and it's a great teaching tool, it's because he's going to the Lions game on Sunday and doesn't want to spend his weekend grading your stupid homework.

So, with clever planning and competency, a mediocre teacher who has been at it a few years, coasting along, and I think most teachers do this, can get by by working a bare minimum of hours, below 40 hours a week even during school, plus gets 16 weeks without having to work, plus can retire at 50 and have a massive pension, plus has insanely good health insurance.

The best teachers put in a lot of time and really help their students, and it's too bad they don't get paid as much, but most teachers are bad, they don't do a lot of work, and are lazy.

I'll continue this screed a bit. I think it's because most teachers have never not been in school. They went to school as children, they went to college, they went right back into school out of college. They don't have firsthand experience of how the real world works, and how much work is too much work, and how much work *real* work is.

For example, I'd much much much rather sit down and grade essays for 10 hours than go through receipts for 5 hours to find out where my accounting client screwed something up so I can fix it in the books. I'd rather sit down and grade essays for 40 hours than go work on an assembly line for 5. I'm much more mentally taxed by trying to figure out an engineering problem than writing comments on a students' lab report like "make sure to use the passive voice!"

*EDIT*And another thing. I see a lot of student teachers in education classes with math and spanish degrees. I ask them why, and they say "I liked those subjects in high school." That's fine, but what are you going to do with a math degree. They face this quandary. They think "I know, I'll teach math!" and now you have Mrs. Crain, your math teacher who loves math but can barely relate to her students. She didn't know what to do so she turned to something she knows. A lot of teachers want to teach, but I think a lot of teachers just don't know what else to do.

So, in my opinion. The work is easy, can be minimal, and you get way too many benefits. If you're a really good teacher though, the work can be hard, exhaustive, and the pay isn't nearly enough, the only thing keeping you there is because you love teaching.

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