Yes. And most jobs come with some stress. That stress may just be different. That’s life.
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All jobs do come with stress. I just wanted to squash some beliefs (not from here) that teachers don’t work for their salaries and benefits. I have a friend who works from 3-5 am every single day because that’s the only time she can grade essays and work on plans etc. Then she puts in an additional 9 hours from 8-5.
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In addition to the “vacation time” don’t forget they also get federal holidays off, the Friday after Thanksgiving, where we are they also get the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, plus PTO days and a whole bunch of sick days. So as far as benefits, you definitely can’t complain one bit.
Of course, if in the tech sector, one will make a lot more money and have great benefits, but we aren’t comparing to that. But you are correct that there are many entry level post college jobs that do not make 50k or anywhere close to it. Eventually some will make 200k but teachers definitely aren’t going into teaching for the money as we all know. But for those like in my district and many others that complain about not making money, that is false.
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Those early lunches really stink, especially when you then have to sometimes go straight through until 315 without a break. This has happened to me countless times due to block schedules and such. Teaching these days as @twogirls has said is so different now than 30 years ago with the emails, behavior, IEPs, etc. Two years ago when I was doing one of my homebound tutoring assignments, they wanted me to come to the IEP meeting. Turns out they also wanted me to write up a report for it. Wow, that was something else and enlightening since I hadn’t had to do that before, having left full time teaching years ago. I was lucky though because they paid me extra for my time for writing the report and my time for coming to the meeting. Teachers however, don’t get paid extra for writing those reports or the meetings which are often time consuming and take time out of the school day (or outside of school) when they could be working on other planning or seeing students. This is what then causes it to often be a 24/7 job.
As a math teacher I now see how and where there will be many shortages in coming years. Science as well. There are people coming into those fields, however, many more going into the private sector. I do wonder if they will ultimately have to pay more to those specialties at some point and blow up the whole salary schedules to get these people, otherwise they may not be able to. Especially Computer Science teachers.
100% it’s way more costly to live in certain places in the North than the south but many places in the South also don’t have basements, which my daughter thought was so weird when she just stayed with friends, lol and I also have heard many times that the houses in some of those states are not built as well as up North and some schools are not as good in certain states, which would make sense if they aren’t paying the teachers, they may have trouble attracting good ones.
@deb922 I don’t think anyone is talking about one job working harder than the next. Last year when we were all stuck at home and I didn’t have my cleaning people come and was doing it myself, IMO that was the hardest job ever. Then I had to color my own hair and the first time was something else. I still have a large color stain on my floor rug I can’t get out in the wash. I immediately called my colorist and told her how much I appreciated her and that she has the hardest job. So, it is definitely all relative and until one has been in anyone’s shoes no one knows what one goes through or how hard their job is, so at least for me, the last thing I would ever do is make it a contest over what job is harder or not, but as for teaching, and I think @twogirls would agree, there are many amazing teachers, those that do work almost 24/7 and are way under appreciated. Stepped up to the plate big time during covid, etc. But that said, there are also teachers that suck big time and have absolutely no business teaching and are overpaid for what they do. When we first went back hybrid and our teachers were vaccinated courtesy of our district, they were given until after spring break to come back in person. Many came back beforehand, but some still claimed they had older people that were compromised, or children at home, blah blah. So, the BOE told them fine they can stay home until after break, which gave them an extra 4 weeks of remote teaching. Well, turns out a teacher was doing her remote class while ordering lunch at a fast food drive in on zoom. Wth? So inappropriate especially considering the claim that she couldn’t leave her house, etc. The district wasn’t putting up with that and the teacher was then required to come back to school in person as her waiver was taken away. So things like that these teachers in my district making well over 100k and pull bs like this. Parents were furious. Teaching a class while ordering and eating food in your car. Lovely. Then there were teachers that just didn’t show up on the zooms, etc. Or turn back work. That’s the problem. The all or nothing mentality. Teachers jobs are so protected because they get tenure way too early and have automatic pay increases and are not on a merit pay system which is honestly how it should be. But once you have tenure, bam, some become lazy as can be and it doesn’t matter if you’re in the top district or not, you still have sucky teachers that no one can get rid of, sadly.
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My job was recently joined into a private sector union. I was and still am covered by a company run 401k program which I have contributed heavily to. Once entering the union a pension became available with no choice but to join. We were given the choice of how much each separate group of positions personally contributes. The minimum was 10 cents an hour. Initially I thought it would be silly to just out in that little as there would be very little coming back at the end. Ultimately my group did choose the minimum. Some other groups put in 3, 4, or even 5 dollars an hour. Once you put in a certain amount you can never choose to contribute less, although they will let groups up their contributions freely. Those high contributing groups will certainly have more coming at the end, if something doesn’t happen with the pension that is. The pension is run by the union. There have already been letters sent out regarding problems with pension funding. I am very happy to just take whatever money I would have contributed to that pension and put it in my 401k where I make the investment decisions and don’t have to rely on an outside entity that in the end could probably care less about me. I imagine in many public sector unions that contributions come from the entity and not necessarily the employees. Perhaps they should all switch over to 401k type programs and avoid these potential pension issues.
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Teachers where I work do not get off for all legal holidays- we have professional development on those days. The students have off. We get 2 long weekends per year- Thanksgiving and Memorial Day. We do not have off the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, but we have off that Friday. We are not permitted to use personal days to extend the Thanksgiving or Memorial Day weekend, and we are not permitted to use a personal day (we get 2) to extend a school vacation.
I use my summer to work part time and to complete my required education hours that the state requires me to do every year.
It takes me 6 hours to write my reports etc and I do them on Sundays. My colleagues are hard workers, but others might not be (I agree with the comment noted above). That happens all over. I had a hospital job where my supervisor left after lunch every single day instead of 4:00 which was his scheduled time to leave.
The vast majority of teachers I know are hard working and put in many more hours than they are contractually obligated to (which is 40 hours). Last spring was the hardest job I ever had.
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Last winter I agreed to fill in for a former colleague’s maternity leave, from mid-April until the end of the year in mid-June. Well of course, COVID happened! They went from full in-person to full-remote with 2 weeks to prepare. Fortunately I was able to rely on my former colleagues as I was playing catch-up when I joined them.
Two takeaways from that experience: (1) I felt that I worked harder as a remote teacher than I did in person–I’ve only been retired 4 yrs. (2) Despite all the difficulties, kids who wanted to learn did so even though it was remotely. Those who chose not to learn did not–same as in-person. In fact, one of the classes was an AP Chemistry class. I had to finish the last unit of content and do the test review/prep with them. Granted, the test was modified given the situation, but those kids did exceedingly well!! They understood the rotten hand life had dealt them and adapted.
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I’m a little behind, but saw the article in which the doctor asserted that the US healthcare system was superior to centralize (socialized) healthcare systems that would fail and that the evidence for this was vaccine production and distribution.
This guy’s logic is painfully weak. The article is a triumph of ideology over facts or logic. The EU failed in vaccine purchasing/production because they put in charge of the negotiations a trade negotiator who was focused on a) getting the lowest price; and b) making sure vaccine makers had liability. There is a great Wall Street Journal article describing this. Absolutely the wrong priorities. Israel, which has government-sponsored healthcare, got the rollout done right. They went to Pfizer and said, “We can roll out very quickly given our centralized healthcare system. We will give you immediate access to all of our data (even if it violates privacy laws) in return for being first. You will be able to put positive studies out ahead of Moderna to increase your market position.” Pfizer delivered to Israel first, Israel’s centralized healthcare system got the vaccines to patients before the US, Pfizer got the data for the studies. As @ucbalumnus points out, the UK also with “socialized” or centralized healthcare did well with vaccines. The problems were political and not due to the organization of the health care system. Moreover, Canada with its centralized health care system did light years better on preventing the spread of the disease before the vaccine.
In short, there is nothing in the COVID vaccine example that provides strong evidence that centralized health care systems will fail or even perform poorly in handling problems like COVID. The author just wants to believe that the the US system is better but I would fail him for shoddy logic if he were a student.
With respect to drug development and who develops drugs, there are a couple of interesting things. First, in many countries, the country’s health care system buys all of the drugs for the country. So, they have a lot of leverage with the drug companies, because if the company can’t reach a deal, it won’t be able to sell to patient’s in the country. In contrast, each hospital or health care system in the US purchases the drugs (sometimes through a buying consortium). They are much smaller than the pharma companies and have a lot less leverage. Our politicians have prevented Medicare from using its considerable negotiation leverage to negotiate prices. The bad news: The US pays much higher drug prices than many other nations. As a consequence, US consumers pay a vastly disproportionate share of the cost of drug development for the whole world. Other nations should be grateful for our largesse. But, because our system had healthcare run through employers, high health care costs also reduce our companies’ competitiveness.
The second interesting fact is that of the ten biggest drug companies, four are American, two are Swiss, one is Chinese, one is German, one is British, and one is French. These companies are not headquartered in the US but, with the possible exception of the Chinese firm, likely make the vast bulk of their profits in the US. We do provide much greater incentives for drug companies to charge more and hence to innovate (or do fake innovation as drug companies also do). That means that the other countries are free riders on our largesse.
I’m not a health care expert but I have advised hospitals, health insurers, pharma companies, drug distribution companies in a number of countries and sat on the board of a health care company in another country. I don’t see evidence that the US healthcare system is better than others. The US system costs more per capita by a lot and delivers worse outcomes for the population as a whole. I see two great strengths to the US system. First, it offers the best care in the world (or close) for the folks at the very high end of the income distribution. People at the high end of the economic pecking order can see doctors immediately for elective surgery and have many fewer restrictions, though for things are comparable if there is an immediate problem and preventive care is worse here. Second, as Malcom Gladwell pointed out, the US system focuses a lot of its resources and prestige on heroic care – last minute interventions with fabulous techniques and technologies – but is weak on preventive medicine. Plus, the US system of health insurance tends to incentivize people with not the best insurance to put off doctor visits until problems are more severe. As a consequence, health outcomes for the population overall are not strong compared to many other countries.
All the other systems have flaws as well (e.g., in Canada, as a cost-cutting measure, they sometimes wait months to years to introduce the latest tests or treatments if they are more expensive. More generally, their political systems make clear the tradeoffs between the cost of healthcare and other government activities and sometimes the political will is not there to spend more on healthcare even if voters still want all of the benefits of the spending.
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@shawbridge your statements are well thought out. Despite all that you say, the strengths of living in the US far outweigh other countries in many aspects. With health in the US, yes preventative health can go a long way - and the main proponents are people managing their weight and leading healthy lives. Those two things are where US citizens are driving up their health care costs and lowering their QOL.
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A teaching and/or school coaching position is still a great option for graduates of regional universities. Other than accounting and sales, plus nursing, it’s the most stable position for a college graduate. Most regional universities won’t detail what graduates make, or if they do, they only get at most half of students to respond to the surveys.
As some have mentioned with various drug plans and drug costs - if one has a maintenance drug, one can work to find the best was to get the quality drug at the best cost for the health insurance plan you are under.
Once in a while there has been a problem with manufacturing of a particular drug and the alerts/alarm was up – I think a recent one was on Losartan, where the drug purity and therefore effectiveness affected a lot of the US drug supply.
There has been focus on the very high costs of some diabetic medications like insulin and how those prices can run super high if not on your plan pharmacy list or you purchase it at out of network provider – and the federal gov’t was getting involved in some of the gouging – what the pharmaceutical companies would do would be to slightly change the insulin and then they had name brand pricing/no generics available.
I know one of the new diabetic drugs being advertised now with taking it just once a week - it runs over $1k (IDK if it is a month supply). Same with some of the new Migraine medications - I had a patient in rehab facility that had received 4 or 8 packaged pills from her private physician - provided by drug rep – I think those would cost $1600 for those 4 or 8 pills; the hospital would not provide the drug when she had a migraine there because of the huge cost per pill.
It turns out Walgreens is in our pharmacy network (very convenient to us and that Walgreens is 24/7 and pharmacist not available only for 1/2 hour lunch like at 1:30 am) and our drugs are relatively low cost, including the nasal sprays I take for allergies – with my allergy drugs I will be paying more for the Medicare D drug plan than my DH. Since we will be on a Medicare drug plan soon, I verified those costs and compared mail in VS Walgreen pricing too. That is a benefit of the Medicare Part D drug plan that consumer can change from year to year - when one gets on different medications/maintenance medications, can ‘shop’ from year to year to stay on the best plan for oneself.
And if inner city food deserts were replaced by food stores that offered fresh, unexpired, healthy food at reasonable prices, it might be easier for a lot of people to manage those two things.
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No question @SOSConcern. I choose to live in the US. ShawWife is Canadian and we could live there. I am a world expert in my field and probably could have residency in a lot of countries. But, I’m a capitalist at heart and have started or helped start several companies. I have benefitted from much of what is good about the US and from globalization of trade that has caused me to be in demand in many countries other than the US. I just hate sloppy logic like that appearing in that article, especially when it is inspired by ideology and not by evidence. We have a lot of that going around these days.
With respect to QOL, I think for most normal people, it would be higher in Canada than the US (ignoring the weather). If you are at the top of your field or aspiring to be the best in the world at what you do, the US beats Canada. If you are mega-wealthy, the US beats Canada. But for a normal person who goes to work at. a company, wants to do a good job, but doesn’t expect to be the CEO or start a new firm, I think the average Canadian has a higher quality of life. Many middle class Canadians have cottages for the weekend. In the area where we live in the US, many of the people who could afford weekend houses are working so hard they don’t really have time for them (but they came in awfully handy in the Pandemic). For me, the US is preferable because of my ambitions.
I also fear that some of the things that actually made America great have been and are being cut back. Enabling immigrants to come in and contribute, providing a good education to the middle class, not blocking socio-economic mobility have very important to the US’s economic strength. My grandparents came to the US as very young kids from Eastern Europe as their parents wisely wanted to avoid getting killed in pogroms. They came with nothing but worked to get good educations for their kids. On my father’s side, he got a PhD and his sister got a PhD and then a law degree. On my mother’s side, she got a PhD and her brothers were a lawyer and a geologist. They all made sure their kids had good educations. Economically, each generation has surpassed the rest, though my father’s scientific contributions would be insanely difficult to top. I have worked very hard to enable my kids to get really good educations and have careers that they would love and that helped them make a living. I think my son will surpass us economically. I am already putting aside money for the education of grandkids who don’t yet exist.
From my perspective, since the 1980s, we as a nation have been eating the seed corn rather than planting it. We have been underinvesting in pure science and in defense science – which created lots of the economic growth we see today. We have been disinvesting in public education. And making immigration harder has hurt. I think Canada does a much better job than we did of bringing in immigrants who will help the economy and that we should emulate their approach. One study I saw said that the exodus of Jewish scientists from Germany before WW II is still costing Germany 1% of GDP annually. That has been to the benefit largely of the US and Israel to a lesser extent the UK. Another study found that 40% of Silicon Valley CEOs were Asian (China, Southeast Asia, South Asia). It is crazy for us to impede the flow of those folks to the US.
My son is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Today, I’d advise him to stay there. There are many paths that this country could follow. The best ones we won’t follow, but some are pretty good. However, others are not. For some of those, I would reconsider that advice.
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@shawbridge I do believe Canadians keep themselves healthier than US - at least with controlling one’s weight and getting exercise. IDK about tobacco product use.
Canada unfortunately is entering some of the slippery slope areas - it is evident in this country in some states, but I do suspect that in some areas of Canada an older person is not able to get the treatments for medical conditions as there are here to stretch out one’s remaining life.
Canada is a large geographic country which I am sure has a lot of differences in what is available for residents in higher concentrated population areas and those in low population areas. True in US, but to a lesser extent.
In many ways the US is strong because we are a union of 50 states. The European Union couldn’t manage to keep the Brits happy enough - look how much has been spent with that turbulence/instability for many British companies and their people with the split from what was agreed with joining EU.
You are right, the paradigm is so different now than what it was on our generation and prior recent generations on how to ‘rise from the ashes’.
A co-worker’s 19 YO son was killed by gun violence from one of his best friends during a rap video/public gathering. To contrast, he left 2 babies from 2 women, and his family had few older generation men for guidance – the culture has totally absorbed some of these young people. I spoke with a cousin’s H who for a time was a public defender; he had a 18 YO client that killed another and with the circumstances is serving minimum 13 years prison – this young man thought his life would end before 25 so that was his frame of mind.
Hopefully our ‘wisdom’ will have us, once we hit retirement, have us continue with good QOL and guide our children/grandchildren well.
@kelsmom it is true that there are ‘food deserts’ - and grocery store locations are a business decision. Getting off on this retirement thread other than something to think about in retirement.
All vaccines are courtesy of our federal government.
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Any experiences with Zoom legal paperwork? I have a friend looking to use it (computer forms, notary signature). It seems lots better than no Will etc for simple sitations. And maybe in more complicated situations it is a good starting point to try to define preferences while procrastinating lawyer visit. Thoughts?
@Colorado_mom here is a company called FreeWill, I think, that is supposed to do a pretty good job on straightforward wills. They get their funding by suggesting to people that leave a bequest to a charity (and have a pretty large list of affiliated charities). We know a planned giving lawyer at a charity who met with them and thought they were legit – but interestingly the planned giving lawyer impressed them so much that they called to see if she was interested in joining.
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I suppose I should have spelled out specifically what that statement meant because I didn’t say paid for by our district which you took that statement as, so apologies for any confusion. When I said courtesy of our district what was meant by that is that our district was able to arrange for all employees, whether they were teachers, staff members, substitutes, aides, food workers in the district, bus drivers etc. to directly receive vaccines by working with a major National pharmacy to bring the vaccines directly to the school to become a vaccine site for the district employees only and run a vaccine clinic for the two days (one day per dose). They then did it again for high schoolers who were not yet vaccinated and then for the 12+ recently even though those students attend a different district they will feed into our high school. By doing this, they were able to have all employees vaccinated by the same date sooner than many other districts where teachers and staff were left to fend for themselves scrambling to find an appt. The district I would in included. I had already received mine because I learned a long time ago not to rely on others as many in my district sat around doing but anyway, the deal with the teachers was that once vaccinated they agree to come in person as parents wanted school to open. We were the only high school at that time in our area not even doing hybrid and the numbers were way down.teachers agreed and then suddenly after being provided the vaccine “courtesy” of the high school arranging it for them, since it wasn’t so easy to get otherwise here, they didn’t want to come back etc. many did but not all. Thankfully after spring break every one of my son’s was back. He was very lucky and had great teachers. Not everyone was that lucky.
Again sorry if you misunderstood
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Kudos to you for stepping up to the plate and tackling that job! I was in the middle of a long term assignment as well when covid happened with one week left and the last thing I wanted to do was suddenly deal with remote and learn it for one week. I went to a last minute full day in service on that Friday when all schools had closed and my gosh was totally confused as was every other teacher. AP teachers thought at that time tests would be cancelled I remember. I got lucky ultimately because my teacher had been out for minor surgery and decided she didn’t want to do that to me lol. So I was off the hook she was going to do that next week and then it was spring break anyway. Turned out they cancelled school again that Monday and had 4 remote days. My son in our district was in Apush and AP Calc BC. Fortunately BC they had finished everything and Apush they had one unit left - the Units they cut out they had done at beginning of the year (they go out of order and teach easier units first) so that was a littl stressful since their method of going out of order could’ve bit then in the ass. He took AP Chem this year and remembered when his teacher said they were at the point where she was when everything shut down last year. Good news is she was ahead when she had thought she was behind.
Agree that kids who are learners learned and others checked out but remote is not good for everyone and even good students have trouble with it. One of my kids saw that with a lot of friends this year. My son didn’t have a single grade change this year whether it was remote or in person but I think it was just so much better once he was back in person even though he did fine remotely. Just getting out of the house.
My overall biggest worry is what gaps are going to be seen next year when everything is full in person with kids who were checked out or getting by through cheating or in general. We cannot let these kids fall through the cracks.