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".