CJ Tylers said:
You know, the time off is actually mandated by the government. The teachers have no say in it. The only non teaching time they lobbied for was "prep time", so that they could have some time during work to actually prepare for what they would be teaching the children. I don't know about you, but there's no way in hell I'd spend unpaid hours working for any company.
The time mandated by government is greatly influenced by the lobbying of the teacher's union. As for anyone spending unpaid hours working for a company, I wouldn't blame you if you didn't. BUT it's a fact of life that in most professions, if you call yourself a professional as teachers do, you spend a lot of time working that is unpaid as do lawyers, accountants, doctors, IT people, etc. When you call yourself a professional, it is up to you to regulate your professional development, keep your accounts (customers), do whatever it takes to ensure your success in the profession. So if you ask me whether or not teachers should be working unpaid, my answer is a resounding "YES". If they don't want that, then they should be paid like common laborers per hour, not salary, and be treated as such. Yet they want to be paid professional development time, want guarantees they will be hired back when they are "fired" in the summer time, etc. They want the best of both professional and labor worlds, it seems.
That they get paid an equivalent of a paltry $15 per hour when they start, that's too bad but once again it is a fact of life. Your wage in any job is dictated by what the market will bear, even if your employer is the government (ie: the taxpayer). No one is forced to become a teacher, so they go into it knowing full well their salary, plus of course the bounty of benefits they collect. The market determines your worth... if you can be easily replaced in your profession because your profession does not demand much skill out of you, then your (monetary) worth is less. That's life.
They don't want to be called "babysitters". Too bad, but when you work with children, essentially you are babysitting them even if you don't want to. This is why I took on a profession that has nothing whatsoever to do with kids. As a teacher, they know full well the job will require babysitting. There is no reason to complain about parents basically utilising them as babysitters.... they just need to accept that it's part of the job, just as lawyers have to babysit criminals and doctors have to deal with diseased people and accountants have to do the books of fraud artists.
The system sucks. But the system has created a bunch of lazy people called teachers. Teachers are therefore lazy.... I don't care how much they work, that they keep complaining about it is evidence of their lack of work ethic and laziness.
There was one point in North America when teachers were looked upon with high respect decades ago. It's the same kind of respect that was once accorded to policemen and doctors. They don't get any respect today because they simply don't deserve it. Parents no longer believe that teachers are educating their children correctly to survive and be successful as adults. Teachers have simply lost virtually all merit as a profession.
