Perks of Teaching

While you'll find few teachers who'd argue that the pay is equitable (it isn't), there are some perks to being a teacher. Of course, there's June, July, and August...and Labor Day, Thanksgiving, a couple weeks off at Christmas, MLK Day, Presidents Day, a week off for Spring Break, and Memorial Day (none of which are technically paid vacations, but the time off is nice nonetheless). Then there's the geographically limited celebrity of being a teacher; kids I had (or have) as students (regardless of whether they hated or enjoyed my class) act genuinely happy and excited to see me when we bump into each other in the community. In addition, I frequently get the employee discount at restaurants and free or reduced movie tickets when waited on by former students (even students who didn't earn good grades in my class).

Then there's the odd jobs. These vary by school district. Thanks to some lucky networking (and proving myself dependable), I'm called on to help administer the SAT and ACT whenever they're given at my high school; half the time I assist for over $20 an hour, the other half of the time I supervise (run the show) for over $30 an hour--not bad money for doing a little paperwork, keeping an eye on test-takers, and reading a book to pass the time (said pay coming from ETS and ACT, Inc., not the school district). The same networking has gotten me into teaching an after school "credit retrieval" class that pays over $1200 for essentially 35-40 hours of actual work. Finally, thanks to the above mentioned networking and my educational background, I also got tapped to teach a dual credit course (the kids earn both high school credit and college credit through the local community college); it pays an extra $200 even though it's part of my regular class load, but more importantly, I'm now also classified as a part-time instructor for the community college and can begin teaching course there as a side job next school year (at $750 per credit hour per semester with the average course being 3 credits), and I circumvented the entire application and selection process for adjunct faculty to boot.

So while there are certainly problems with the teaching profession, problems that need to be rectified, it's really not a bad gig.