Teachers have it pretty good

Yes, I know. My title has poor grammar, but just this once, I will break my own rules. I have been pondering careers (and I have to admit, am still bugging my sons about postsecondary education).

Teachers gripe a lot and go on strike and few of us have sympathy for them. I have a friend (a teacher) who told me that the supply of paper and basic things like that is short and it leads to fighting among teaching staff. I have to agree that basic supplies should be adequate and teachers, on a matter of principle, really should not have to buy them from their own pay cheques.

However, overall, they are well-paid in my view. One friend who is a retired teacher used to complain to me that she grossed $50,000 /year and only took home $30,000. Well I have news for her, I will most likely never gross $30,000 in my career of medical transcriptionist. If I sell my book (gotta write it first, of course) I might top $30,000, so I am open to a miracle.

Also, teachers, as we all know, get long holidays over the summer months, when they can, if they wish, pursue an alternate way of earning a living, or just take a holiday and/or a trip. They can afford Hawaii or even England on their salary. Trips like that are only pipe dreams for me (Airmiles to the rescue for me). They also get long Christmas and Spring breaks.

Yes, I know, they take homework home with them, but so do many other people who earn less money - managers of various sorts. Many managers have to work at least half a day on Saturday too.

Several of my teacher friends are retired at 55 with tidy pensions and money for a comfortable lifestyle. The thing that really got to me about this is that I just recently learned that my cohorts (high school friends) only had one more year of university than I did! They earned their Bachelor of Education Degrees here in British Columbia one course at a time over many years. I had no idea about this for many years. Perhaps if I had known this, I would have gone back to SFU for one additional year prior to getting married. The only strings attached were that the teachers had to be willing to teach in rural BC (I was living in Sointula so I could have qualified for that). Oh well, they say "What you don't know won't hurt you." Well at least consciously it didn't hurt me, but I have been hurt financially.

To be truthful, I would not trade many parts of my life - it certainly held an amazing amount of variety, despite the fact I lived in an isolated miniscule town (Sointula) for 20 years. I did travel during those years - to Oklahoma all by myself (to attend ORU for a weekend), California, Calgary, and many, many times to the lower mainland of BC to visit my mother and family members.

That's my blurb for today. Nite all.