Calculating Your Salary-seventy cents per student

Calculating Your Salary....

is interesting and fun and depressing and eye-opening.

Of course everything is relative, we all have enough to live, no teacher is starving, yadda yadda, simplicity, Oprah, be content with what you have, Om Shanti and Namaste.

Moment of Zen over.  (Ever notice how practitioners of certain professions are advised to be content whilst others are advised on how best to preserve their wealth during a volatile market??)

Okay...back from Other Musings...

Let's say you make $40,000.  That's a lot of money.  At least, it sounds like a lot of money to me, right now.  More on this later.

What is your per kid wage?  How much are you being paid per child you care for?

Let's do math:

$40,000 divided by
190 days in a school year  (approximately, including teacher work days)
divided by 10 hours a day (your real hours)
divided by 30 students (if you are an elementary school teacher)

= 70 cents per student per hour.

Just let that ferment for a bit.

If you are a parent, how much do you pay a babysitter per hour to care for your kids?

SEVENTY CENTS?

No..I thought so..I thought more on the order of 15 dollars!

I can't find the original blog post that gave me the idea to calculate it this way...but I must say I never thought of it this way...ever...I wonder why...I wonder why people refuse to examine teacher pay in a rigorous, 21st century way.

My operant theory of course, is that teacher pay--and the thinking behind it--is stuck firmly in Victorian times, or worse...back when a teacher was paid with a chicken and a handful of carrots.

The post I read SOMEWHERE today suggested that just for fun, we calculate how much you would have to pay a babysitter to take care of 30 (or MORE*) students all day for 190 days.  It was a SIX FIGURE SALARY. (*I know music teachers who have 80-120 kids in a classroom at a time!)

Much has been said about "babysitting," particularly in regards to the Wisconsin teacher uprising.  Many harsh words for teachers, words like "teachers are glorified babysitters."

Did one teacher or administrator, or journalist, or politician point out that teachers are the MOST underpaid babysitters in the country?

One can say, yeah, but there is the economics of scale...taking care of 30 students is not thirty times harder than taking care of one.  It might be 3 times, maybe even 4 or 5 times harder, but not 30 times harder.

Oh....really?  Spend one day in a school.  One...day.

And, at any rate, even if it is MERELY three times harder, the hourly wage should be at least THREE times that of a babysitter....when I left [yes...I left]...I was making about 22 bucks per hour.  No matter how generous I was in my calculations, I could not figure my hourly wage above $25 per (or thereabouts)...

One reason I ditched.  I now charge 50 bucks per hour for my tutoring.  Soon to be $60.

More later...so much more....

(I'm back....)