Dan said: Yes, there is an unfair distribution of wealth in this country. I agree. And I could mention how my teacher-neighbor leaves for work at 8:30 am and comes home at 3:30 pm every day, gets every weekend, holiday, x-mas break and spring break off, and doesn't work for 3 months during the summer, but I won't. Well, maybe I will. She worked a total of 165 days at 6 hours a day last year compared to my 320+ days at 10 to 14 hours a day. ..., I have to say that I don't care for it much when I see my property tax bill has gone up again on account of the school district needing additional money to pay teachers more than I make, even though they only work half as much. Of course, they probably spend a lot of time at home grading papers and such (wink, wink).
dmb says: In the interest of full disclosure I should say that my wife is a teacher, some of my best friends are teachers and I hope to teach college after I graduate. The hours aren't quite as sweet as people make it sound. Teachers have to attend courses to keep up with the latest findings and there are lesson plans and meetings and some teachers teach in the summer. It's not an easy job and if you compare a teacher's earnings to other people with the same level of education (A Master's degree in my wife's case) teachers actually make less than their counterparts in the private sector. Teaching has never been considered a lucrative field. Nobody ever got rich as a teacher. But some people value stability and security and the rewards of doing something helpful over wealth and that's what's attractive. Teachers don't make more than they used to. It just seems that way by comparison because wages in the private sector have been shrinking. Now it's almost as if people resent teachers because they haven't yet been screwed at badly as everyone else. Man, I just don't get that attitude. I mean, do we want to make sure everyone gets equally ripped off and abused as the nation's wealth moves into the bank accounts of the few or would it make more sense to form some kind of middle class alliance to push back against this trend. As I see it, they've got regular people fighting each other over tiny scraps. They're pitting us against each other. It's like there is 100 people sharing a pizza with 100 slices. One top guy takes 80 slices and the bottom 50 people have to sh are one slice among them so they each get one 50th of one slice. The professions are in between those two extremes. All the people who had to go through higher education and some kind of internship like doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers and professors can still have a middle class lifestyle and hopefully send their kids to college. But the middle class is shrinking at an alarming rate. And this attack on teachers and other public sector workers is just one more example of that destruction. Divide and conquer. That's what they're doing to us and, sadly, it's working. Don't buy it, Dan. Check out this amusing little clip. Diane Ravitch on the Daily Show. She used to be the Secretary of Education under the first Bush but now she's out there with a book explaining what is going on with our schools. It ain't pretty. http://annmic.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/diane-ravitch-the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-030311-video-clip-comedy-central/ Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
