Teachers As Babysitters - Do You Really Want To Go There?

Now and again, someone will make the comment that teachers are overpaid, because they are often "just babysitters".

Please pay me babysitter wages to teach.

Babysitters commonly make at least $5 per hour per child.

With a class of 30, that's $150 an hour.

Even leaving out the time I would spend on paperwork (preparing lessons, correcting papers, doing administrative things like writing reports, contacting parents, meeting with social workers, etc.), that's at least five hours a day of directly "babysitting" the kids, making it $750 a day.

Multiply that by the 180 classroom days in a year and you'll be paying a starting teacher $135k per year - without ANY paid vacation.

Then you'll need to add more to cover all those other duties - let's call it four more hours a day at $10 per hour, which gets us to an additional $7,200 per year.

Since we haven't gotten into paid vacation or holidays yet, we need to add two weeks of vacation, and 13 holidays, for a total of 23 extra days, at the rate of $790 a day. That's an additional $18,170 per year.

Math time!

$135,000
+$18,170
+$ 7,200
= $160,370

So, please sign me up for your plan that will pay me a $160k per year starting salary as an in-school "babysitter".

You know that terrible "Common Core Math" thing?

Since you're on the internet, I'm sure you've seen some kind of post, comment, or meme that claims to show you a "Common Core Math" problem.    What you are seeing are actually problems from Everyday Math and other textbooks/curricular sources being touted as "Common Core Math". The CC are a set of standards used to guide the teacher (as well as the student and parents) to teach concepts that are developmentally appropriate for their grade level, and to a lesser extent, to measure the effectiveness of teaching and learning.

The curriculum is whatever means that a state/district/school/or teacher uses to teach those concepts.

This is analogous to your employer telling you that you and your team must attend meetings in Denver, St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Boston, but allowing you to decide whether to take a plane, train, bus, or car. The standard is that you will meet with certain people in each of those cities. The curriculum is how you choose to get there. It is even possible that some team members will be more comfortable using a different means of transport to get between the meetings - just as different students respond to different methods of learning a skill.

While the Common Core standards are not perfect, they are an improvement over the previous standards in some states.   They also align the standards across many states, so that, if you move to a new state, your child won't be a year ahead in some areas, and a year behind in others.  This is why you might be hearing conflicting complaints that the Common Core is "too hard" and at the same time "dumbs things down".

http://www.corestandards.org/read-the-standards/