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Common Dreams reports
Colorado's teachers' union expects more than 400 teachers at a rally that's planned for Monday at the state's Capitol in Denver.
[...] Englewood School District, outside the capital city, announced on Sunday that schools would be closed the following day as 70 percent of its teachers had indicated they wouldn't be working Monday. It was unclear on Sunday whether more school districts would be closing.
"We are calling Monday, April 16th a day of action", Kerrie Dallman, president of the Colorado Education Association (CEA), told KDVR in Denver.
[...] According to[1] KMGH in Denver, "The CEA estimates that teachers spend on average $656 of their own money for school supplies for students." The state's teacher salaries rank 46th out of 50, with educators making an average of $46,000 per year.
Public schools are underfunded by $828 million this year, Dallman told the Post, and lawmakers have said they could inject at least $100 million more into schools--but they have yet to do so.
[...] The planned protest follows a trend that was seen in West Virginia and Kentucky before moving west this month to Oklahoma and Arizona as well as Colorado. In all the states where teachers have walked out and rallied at their Capitols, teachers have reported paying for school supplies out of pocket, working second and third jobs to make ends meet, and coping with funding shortages while their legislators hand out tax cuts to corporations.
[1] For a laugh (or perhaps a deep sigh), check out all the whitespace in the source code of the page.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @03:27PM (2 children)
Don't forget that most school districts expect teachers to complete continuing education during the summer, or the fact that they work 8 hours at the school every school day and grade homework at night.
The whole 9 month argument is ridiculous. Its comparing apples to oranges and totally ignores all context.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16 2018, @08:09PM
Article [commondreams.org]
Contains a useful bar graph, broken down by state
In no state are teachers paid more than other college graduates [epi.org]
In 1 state (Arizona), it's 63 percent.
In the "best" state (Massachusetts) it's 83 percent.
over the summer
When I was a kid, some schoolteachers taught summer school or driver's ed for a few weeks.
The ones that go into the general job market for those months are at a disadvantage because the boss knows they will be gone in a few weeks.
...and several of the articles I have seen on this topic say that DURING THE SCHOOL YEAR it's not uncommon for a teacher to have a 2nd or 3rd job e.g. delivering pizza.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday April 17 2018, @04:45PM
Yeah about that oft repeated meme, I donno.
Some is nostalgia. I vaguely remember we all had to read "Blubber" about bullying a fat chick, back in the old days when all chicks were not fat, in about 5th grade and write book reports individually as she would be cross checking to see if we cheated as a group, and I sweated that single page report for at least one entire night or so, but I'd think the average college educated elementary school teacher could read, correct, and grade a class worth of 20 or so pages of hand written scrawl in not much more than an hour of watching TV, so yeah it might have been agonizing for me as a kid to write, but I suspect she didn't put more than a minute or two into grading my literary masterpiece. I have to think about that for a minute... at my 2018 typing speed of 100+ WPM I could type that essay almost as fast as my 5th grade teacher likely read it... Who here is old enough to remember red pen to correct errors? My kids do everything on google docs, so they've never had the experience of getting a graded essay covered in red pen.
I think the worst term paper I ever had to write from K-12 was about 8 pages typed a position paper about nuclear power for "advanced smart kids or whatever term they used" senior economics class. But that was like one midterm paper one time ever, and the teacher was a bro of an easy grader.
Also I really enjoyed group grading, I can't remember any K-12 math class where my assignments were not group graded by some fellow student looking at the overhead projector for three minutes at the start of class. Yeah I don't think my high school trig instructor missed too many episodes of The Love Boat or Fantasy Island or Threes Company by grading my homework instead.
Now the people really deserving of pity are those poor bastards teaching University Freshman Composition who have 350 students turn in a minimum 20 page midterm on some bullshit (I vaguely recall it was my thoughts on the Athenians idiotic idea of invading Sicily which lost them the Peloponnesian War, and believe it or not this was assigned to me not chosen, Democracy, what a shitty way to run a country). Oh and the students think they'll get graded midterms the next day. All for Adjunct Professor pay, thats a couple cents per graded page?
God help me my kindergarten teacher SiL will repeat this meme about spending all night grading homework and I can't tell if she's out trolling me or insane or doing an entire backlogged semester of grading all at once. I'm pretty sure she can out shitpost me in terms of writing personalized custom responses to each kid; even I would struggle with that but school teachers probably had a college class on shitposting comments on kids assignments or similar, or maybe they have a cliff notes style book of suggested comments, I donno.
Anecdotally public school teachers can really party; if on the one night per week they're not on tindr/grindr or sitting in a bar drunk, they have to spend an hour of TV time grading an entire weeks homework all at once, eh, I'm not feeling too sorry. Here have my copy of Machine Learning by Flach and stop bitching about "working at home". They gotta walk up hill both ways to get to work in snow every day too. Boo hoo.