Do you have a job that involves "billable hours?" If you're a lawyer and your firm wants you to maximize your "billable hours" while working on a case for a client, does that mean that the non-"billable hours" aren't working?
What do you think that a teacher does when students aren't sitting in front of him or her? It's certainly not all "spending time with their families." No.
How many hours/year does the typical American work? I'd consider myself a pretty typical teacher. The school day is from 8:25 to 3:15. I arrive daily at 7:00am at the latest and stay until 5:00pm at the earliest, if I have to double in the afternoon. Otherwise I'm here later. When I leave, I always have something unfinished, something more to work on when I get back the next morning. Something else to put on the back-burner while I focus on the more pressing tasks that must be completed the next day for class. During my 60 minute planning period, I have meetings with administrators 3 days a week, thus leaving me 120 minutes a week to plan without staying past my contract hours of 8:05am to 3:30pm.
My contract is for 190 days a year, 7 hours and 25 minutes a day. Most people who work 8-hour days get some time for lunch. I have 20 minutes, tops. That doesn’t include after school meetings three Monday’s a month that go until 4:30 or 5pm, parent-teacher conference nights, after-hours school events that are required by the principal, or times spent before or after school on the phone with parents. Nor does it include time I spend at home planning or grading on top of the time I spend well before and after my contract hours run each day.
I get 2 weeks off for Christmas, one week off for Spring Break, and this summer I’ll have 9 weeks off. So that’s 12 weeks total. But Christmas, New Years, and Easter are really holiday’s anyway, so they don’t count. Neither do the 4th of July or Labor Day. So let’s bring it down to 11 weeks off a year. That’s a lot of time off of work, yes, but I don’t make a lot of money either, do I? I think we’ll both agree teachers don’t make a lot of money, but that’s why this lottery winner is willing to sink down to such a level. They’re already loaded. How many days of paid vacation do you get in your job? How about for the typical American worker? You must know a lot about them. I’ll just take a random guess. 2 weeks possibly? So that gives me 9 weeks off a year, out of 52. Still a lot, but remember the money?
I’m not pretending that my job is harder than your job, nor am I pretending to give a fat turd what your job is. I just don’t like it when ass-clowns pretend to know anything about teaching and how “easy” it is. So why don’t you take off your CAPS LOCK and go down to your local Boys & Girls Club to tutor the kids in your neighborhood? Maybe then we can have a conversation about reality, or at least your new perception of it…