|
Hopefully nobody thinks that's what medicine is like, and hopefully nobody thinks the tv shows about schools are accurate, either. Do they? God, I hope not. I have MDs in my family so I am well aware of their job description and hours.
However, my point is about YOU (not your husband). You don't work right now. I don't fault you for this-- in fact, I have made a decision to work part time myself and probably for the same reasons you have, and we don't go on vacations, or have a new car, or any of the things that some of our dual income friends do-- but comparing the salary of a family with one wage earner to the salary of a family with two wage earners is inherently unfair. Because of the decision you made, your family earns less than some families with two wage earners. You have to consider this when making comparisons. Presumably your husband is making more than the salary of ONE teacher at the same stage in his or her career, right? And I am also guessing that you are thinking mostly of disposable income-- your husband's student loan debt probably makes sure that at this time in your life with only one income you are forced to forgo luxuries. But that won't always be true. Eventually, your life will improve. Compare your husband's eventual earnings (after the debt is gone) to the salary chart for your school district. Look at say, twenty years on the job. The two figures will not compare.
Is it fair that your husband works so hard for so little at this time? Absolutely not. Thirty years ago you would have been able to live quite comfortably on the salary of a physician, and as a wife you would not have had to work, or be forced make tough decisions to manage on one income as so many of us do. But times have changed for the worse. Managed health care has done to the medical profession what poor, bottom-lined focused management has done for every other profession. Teaching and medicine are more alike than you might realize. Both are other-centered professions, where you cannot easily measure output. In both cases you are not making widgets. You are dealing with humans and all the variables that they bring with them. What's funny is that medicine is now much more like nursing than the profession it used to be, in terms of respect. I have both MDs and nurses in my family, and I have heard many times how nurses have been traditionally treated. Overworked, underpaid, disrespected by their supervisors and MDs, etc. Now MDs are in a similar situation, due to having bean counters over them, seeking to decision-making away from them and to usurp their authority. It sucks, and it's wrong. I completely agree with you. Still it does not make it fair for you to compare the salary brought in by one person to the salary brought in by two.
And for the record, having spent some time in the classroom myself, I can tell you that quite a few teachers spend upwards of 60 to 80 hours a week on their work-- only part of it is at school. It's more teachers than you think-- every teacher my son has had has fit this mold, and more than half of the teachers I work with do, as well. I'm sorry to hear that the teachers you know stop work at 4. The ones I know don't. They bring work home with them, and grade mountains of papers at night. The ones I know work summers, too. Almost every teacher I've met does, or takes continuing ed classes. Many of the teachers at the so-called "failing" schools spend 12 hours a day in the classroom and go in on weekends, too. They make themselves available to students at any hour, evenings, nights, weekends, and yes, even the middle of the night if one of their kids is in trouble. I did the same as a teacher. Are there lazy teachers? Sure. But there are lazy and unethical doctors, too. My son has had the misfortune of having a couple of these, and my niece died as the result of a physician who had completely memorized the Krebs cycle, but who really had no deep understanding of it (she had a mitochondrial disorder, and was treated at one of the most prestigious research hospitals in the country. She suffered needlessly before she died due to this man's incompetence.) I was a biology major in college, and most of my classmates were willing to cheat and sabotage others work to get the grade they needed. Only three of the hundred in my class wanted to become a doctor to help people. The rest (this was some time ago when the profession was higher paid!) were in it for the money, hoping to become opthamologists or whatever specialty had the best profit margin. I am not going to assume all MDs (and yes, these classmates are all MDs now) fit the same mold, particularly those who decided to enter medicine when it became a less lucrative field. My son has been lucky enough to be treated by physicians who are the like the person you describe-- someone not in it for the money. Interestingly, they don't lead the Mercedes/BMW lifestyle. They work solo and live modestly. They have my deepest respect.
In my case, my education level is the same as your husband's. I have a Ph.D. plus post doctoral work, yet when I started teaching about 12 years ago I earned 20,500 dollars a year. (And if your husband had left his profession and come down there to teach, that's what he would have made, too, regardless of his education.) For comparison in the city where I worked in South Texas, refinery workers (without a high school diploma) were making 100 thousand. Did that suck? Absolutely, particularly as I had no supplies for my science classroom, and my students were from extreme poverty, which meant that they came to school with nothing. So out of my grand 20.5K salary I spent 3000 to 4000 dollars a year on supplies. I still got to pay tax on that income, however.
My point is this. First, it's silly to compare a one salary family to a two salary family. Second, physicians and teachers should be on the same side of this. Neither make what they deserve. To compare the two unfairly really doesn't advance the discussion.
Cheers!
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(881 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
