Shoe by Gary Brookins and Susie MacNelly for March 04, 2022

Good plan, Skyler…..

It ain’t worth it, Tyler.

When my daughter taught in Arizona, it was June and July they were off. School was done before Memorial Day.

Used to be longer…

So you’ll have plenty of time for working on your masters degree you’ll need to keep your job, and for working an extra job or two to make ends meet and still buy all those classroom supplies the district won’t purchase but you’ll still need.

Around here the schools are even too cheap to pay for a water cooler in the lounge (the water in some areas nearby is incredibly hard and tastes horrible).

Teachers haven’t been off in August for years, but cartoonist don’t seem to know that.

It used to be June, July & August. And uphill both ways.

Used to want to be a teacher but given the way children have become——I’m glad I didn’t make it through college. My education would have been wasted as I would have left the profession within 5 years(or possibly less)cause I couldn’t deal with both the children and their ‘oh, Johnny/Janey is perfect, how could you give them a ’D’ attitude ! ! ! !

In Tennessee teachers are leaving the profession in droves. They are replacing them with “warm bodies” aka anyone they can get. I retired at the right time!

I guess he is looking forward to sitting in boring continuing ed classes to keep his teaching cert up to date.

IMO learning stuff is relatively easy. Showing others how to learn it, not so much so.

make sure you teach in a state that has high salaries, great pensions and benefits. One local school system teachers retired with 70% of salary (100k+) and had lifetime medical benefits paid for

About 40% of those people who major in education, get a teaching job and start teaching are replaced before they make tenure year. Very few who survive that five years are poor teachers. I have taught and I have worked in an office. The major difference is that when you are working in an office you do not have to be paying 100% attention 100% of the time. This isn’t a demand from the front office. It is necessary to maintain the classroom discipline and get the job done. A poor teacher pays for it in student disrespect, and they pay for it heavily.As for summers off, there are mandatory inservice classes and meetings that take up a lot of time. That time will be needed to work on your graduate work, since most districts have the bachelor’s track set up so that raises after about 5 years don’t keep up with inflation. The masters is pretty much necessary for a living wage. Another option is to work a summer job. A friend of mine started mowing lawns and within three years was making too much to make it sensible to come back to teaching.And, when you leave work, you leave work. Each class requires about 20 minutes of prep time if you are revising lessons you have done before. If it’s a new lesson, an hour or two is more likely.After getting a total of 6 1/2 years of college and working for 32 years, I was making about 75% of what my nephew was two years into a sales job.All of the ideas for improving education add about 20% to the classroom hours, and no additional money seems to be available to get extra people to help with the job. Paying the people who are doing it more might make them happy, but it’s not going to increase the quality, because it would be an overwhelming amount of work. Eventually, they are going to get to the point where no one with the intelligence to do the job is going to be dumb enough to take it.

It’s hard to believe someone would say they want to be a teacher for the two month break during the Summer. But, I have heard some say they took up teaching for the hours, vacation time, and good retirement. I don’t think many of them lasted very long as teachers. Teaching, like policing, nursing, and ministering, takes a certain type of calling and commitment to see it through.

Now, it is kind of odd that I and Skyler are somewhat alike. We both didn’t excel in school. But, I wanted to be a band director, and while that never came to be, I did spend several years augmenting my ministerial pay by substituting in my local school district.

Whenever the eight weeks of summer break happen (it hasn’t been more than eight weeks for a long time), teachers are expected to teach summer camps, classes, and do professional development hours. Teachers in our state have to log at least sixty hours of unpaid professional development a year. Many use summer break to work on advanced degrees. It’s no wonder people are leaving the profession in droves. Pay is low; hours, stress, responsibilities, and expectations are high; and the widely assumed long vacation time doesn’t exist in practice.

Let’s see. In June teachers are cleaning up after the previous year and filing paperwork and August teachers are preparing for the coming year, so really, it’s just July.

He has not learned about the hundreds of hours of summer courses that teachers take over the years.

Most teachers do not teach for money or benefits. They work 60 or more hours a week because it is a vocation. It isn’t until it all turns to garbage by politicians and districts and some bad parenting that they question themselves and decide they don’t get enough pay for the bs. Adding to the continuing education facts: a master’s degree is just short of being required in many districts/states and you will never get an increase that will come close to paying for it. I could go on for an hour. What is the reward? Those children in whose lives you made a difference. The absolute joy when a classroom is engaged. Then you can almost forget that most people think schools are suffering because of bad teachers, not bad politics.

Do schools in areas with hard winters give kids time off during the winter and make them go to school when it’s warmest???

A daughter of one of my cousins, I guess she’s a cousin also, was a math major at UCLA the same time as Danica McKeller. While in her junior year she got an internship at an insurance company working in the Actuary Department or whatever it’s called. Two summers later, in the middle of her master’s program, she sat for the state actuarial exam and passed. After finishing up at school she started at the company for a salary almost 3 times as much as what she wold have been making as a math teacher and by the time she was 30 she owned her house, in Los Angeles, outright with no mortgage and no liens. Ask me again why math and science majors are not going into teaching. School districts are losing teachers and other staff, even bus drivers, faster than they can replace them and it is difficult as several states, California included, require a credential in the subject the teacher is teaching and a minimum of an undergrad degree in the subject as well. No more offensive line coaches teaching history during the off season.

A teacher needs to grade final exams and post their grades at the end of the school year. In August, there are meetings and getting things ready for new students. You might get July off.

I think people are overthinking this strip. Skyler always gets his facts wrong in school. He is thinking teachers get the same vacation students do. The strip is funny because we know they don’t.

nicely played