Teachers and Summers!
By Erika Munz
Dedicated to my dear friend Monica Coash; a teacher who
never had a summer off and who was my biggest cheer leader in all
endeavors.
I’ve been a telemarketer, a stage manager/technician, a
pre-school teacher, an auditory training technician, and a department store
cashier. (Among other jobs my fifty-five
year old brain refuses to acknowledge.) My
favorite was the substitute pre-school teaching position, even when the
two-year olds whined for their Miss Nancy
to return. (Apparently preschoolers have
an aversion to walking in single file.) All
experiences I would have missed if I hadn’t become a teacher and had summers off.
As I sat in my third training this summer, I thought about all the
summers of my twenty-nine years of teaching.
Every teacher has heard the phrase, “Oh, it must be so nice to have
summers off,” and Facebook is full of sarcastic memes on the subject. We teachers are always feeling the need to
apologize or explain our summers off. Whenever teachers try to fight for increases
in salary or benefits, we are met with, “But you have summers off.” I find that interesting because this entire
summer, whenever I have tried to schedule appointments or speak with banks,
insurance companies, etc., the human I need to speak with is always on vacation
or “Out of the Office until…” It occurred to me that many companies offer more
than the two weeks of vacation, especially if you have been working at a
company for twenty-nine years. So perhaps, teaching isn’t the only
profession with summers off.
According to
Jessica Yang at Salary.com, the average number of paid days off an employee of
fifteen years receives, in the United States, is twenty-seven days. In terms of weekdays, that is more than five
weeks. Yang didn’t distinguish between degreed
and non-degreed employees. The United
States Department of Labor reports the average for degreed professionals of twenty-five
years, in the United States, is 8.5 paid sick leave days, 8.5 paid holidays and
17.8 vacation days. I know many
professionals employed at government facilities in my state, work only three
more weeks than I do in a year. I would
give up three weeks for four times my salary; I think anyone would.
Because I am a
frustrated archaeologist, and I will be teaching a subject I haven’t taught in
three years, this summer I decided to take three unpaid days of training in
teaching archaeology to students. This
training included a free curriculum, something no teacher can resist. Last week I attended two days of unpaid training
to use a piece of technology I have used for the last three years, only because
I needed to prove I had the training in order to keep it. Teaching is not the only profession with
useless trainings and mandates, it is just one of the few professions in which
you are required to perform duties, outside your paid duty day. This doesn’t include the hours I have spent
researching and compiling lessons for the upcoming year. One week before I am officially required to
return to work, I will be in my new classroom,
(with windows;) moving furniture, cleaning, and unpacking twenty-nine years of
teaching. Posters will be posted, signs
laminated, and parent letters composed, all during my last week of my summer off.
Most teachers, especially those who are single or single parents,
work tirelessly as an educator, while working part-time jobs and then full time
jobs during summers off. So
the next time you think to ask a teacher what they will be doing with their summer off?
Don’t!
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