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I learned recently that teachers in my area actually make decent money. Not like.. Tech industry money, but for my area they make $30/h on the low end, $43/h median, and $52.60/h on the high end.
That's a decent living that most people don't experience. I'm sure some places are awful for teachers though.
Based on the $ ima assume you're American and probably live in a high cost of living area, they get paid that much to compensate for high prices. They're probably as poor as the rest of us.
Average wage in my area is around $30/h.
Yeah so they're poor.
Poor in my mind is not having basic necessities. At $30/h here you could definitely like.. own a house, pay all your bills, buy groceries, pay for a vehicle, and still have like... $500+ left in your budget on a single income.
In my experience average pay is just above the peverty line in a given area. Most teachers make shit, especially for what they're doing. And if the starting pay in your area is $30 the CoL is probably very high.
Like yeah, they're not homeless, but most people are barely getting by on the average wage in the area.
It's worth noting that, depending on where you're talking about, there are a number of possible problems with your figures:
- Teachers in general work far, far more hours than they are officially "required" to. They simply don't get paid for enough time to actually do all the lesson prep and marking necessary to do their job.
- Schools don't operate for about 3 months per year. If you're looking at hourly rate, teachers are on less than three quarters the yearly salary of a full-time position at the same rate.
- As was the point of this meme, teachers are often expected to spend their own money on things for their classrooms. This can range from party stuff to paying out-of-pocket for print-outs of worksheets given to students, to literally needing to buy pencils for students to use.
- Teaching is not a low-skill job. It requires a university degree, during which time they likely supplied many hours of unpaid labour in the form of "prac" work experience. Early pracs might be mostly learning experiences where the student teacher isn't providing much value, but towards the end of their degree teachers will often literally just be the ones responsible for teaching the class.
- It's, like, an important job. Arguably the most important job in our society, up there with far-better-remunerated roles like doctors and civil engineers in terms of doing things that are fundamentally important to keeping society running.
Future teacher here, my salary starts at 52$ CAD/hour, which is great! But I'm only paid for the time I'm in class, which is roughly 3h45 per day...
This pay doesn't include the time to prepare the class, the time to correct, the time to attend mandatory meetings on the lunch break. Finally, we don't have our vacation payed, so they split our pay to give us a salary during the summer (okay this last point is fair, but it illustrates that hourly salary in education is not representative).