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Careers: Elementary/Middle/High School Teacher 264 Views
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Transcript
- 00:00
smell elementary middle high school teacher are one of those a la shmoop
- 00:07
a home in the Hamptons a private jet mountains of cash shiny bling I'll enjoy [fancy home, jet plane, vault full of money]
- 00:13
the pretty pictures people because if you decide to go the teacher route well
- 00:18
you're never gonna get your hands on any of this stuff there's no such thing as a
- 00:21
financially successful high school teacher hua masses great wealth or [teacher eating apple near yacht]
Full Transcript
- 00:26
fortunes and names their yacht yo teach considering that most teachers are smart
- 00:31
individuals very few of them go into their professions thinking they're about [teacher dreaming about money]
- 00:36
to make Bank well sure you might make more dough teaching at a holy Torah
- 00:40
private school in Beverly Hills than you would if you were teaching in the inner
- 00:43
city public schools of Philadelphia but there's a ceiling on how much dough you
- 00:47
make and that ceiling is usually you know covered with spitballs so why [spit ball lands on teacher's head]
- 00:51
become a teacher then at all well if you've got a razor-sharp mathematical
- 00:55
mind why spend seven hours a day babysitting teenagers with a Dede when
- 00:59
you could be rolling in moolah as a Wall Street trader if your debating skills [man rolling in money]
- 01:03
are top-notch well why not channel that ability into a career as a trial lawyer
- 01:08
or a politician or a real estate agent well is there truth to that whole those
- 01:13
who can't teach axiom well not so fast first of all
- 01:17
money is nice having money makes life easier grants you comfort and security [child counting money]
- 01:21
adds value by giving you the freedom to take trips overseas and allows you to
- 01:26
post bail when you um you know make an error in judgment but for some well it [woman behind bars]
- 01:30
isn't enough for some people it's more important to change minds and lives to
- 01:35
give young people the tools to be the next great inventor or chemists or
- 01:38
architect or software designer rather than pursue those avenues for themselves [man lounging in pool]
- 01:43
and to have their summers off that's a perk for those willing to sacrifice a
- 01:47
certain lifestyle teaching can be an attractive gig let's look at some pros
- 01:51
and cons here Pro you work from 8 to 3 9 months a year with days off for [pros and cons on blackboard]
- 01:55
vacations yeah that's not counting the hours you
- 01:57
spend at home each evening grading papers and tests and preparing the next
- 02:01
day's assignments but you don't do that every night and the whole thing's not a
- 02:05
bad deal timewise four months out of the year you're able to do whatever you want
- 02:09
provided it doesn't cost too much money and if you want the opportunity to make
- 02:13
Ordo well the opportunities usually there you can teach summer school you
- 02:17
can coach a sport sell knockoff watches and the teachers lounge
- 02:21
so yeah freedom in the form of time off is a big eat and that usually doesn't
- 02:24
get calculated when they throw out those low salary numbers - yeah all right Kahn
- 02:28
you're gonna watch all of your students learn grow up and achieve all sorts of
- 02:31
amazing things that you never will you used to have all kinds of dreams but you
- 02:36
gave him up in order to teach well now you'll have to live vicariously through
- 02:40
your students whose dreams are still very much alive so yeah you're the kind
- 02:45
of yoda-like person - there Luke Skywalker biding your time and your [Yoda and Luke in a swamp with light sabers]
- 02:49
little swamp while they go traipsing all over the galaxy on various adventures it
- 02:53
can be tough you might have to pay a visit or two to a school counselor [woman cries on counselor's shoulder]
- 02:57
here's a pro those students are gonna remember you and thank you and a tribute
- 03:01
at least some of their success - you're above and beyond level of instruction
- 03:05
and inspiration and some of them will keep in touch with you over the years
- 03:08
considering you of Vital enough influence in their lives that they'll [woman on phone]
- 03:11
want to keep you there alright well there isn't much more fulfilling work
- 03:15
out there even if it does fill your checking account with fat stacks of cash
- 03:19
Kahn you're gonna have one long 50-year headache well first there are the kids
- 03:25
they can be rowdy subordinate and sometimes downright belligerent they [kids playing on bus]
- 03:29
don't really want to be there they'll disobey you simply refuse to complete
- 03:32
their assignments and disappoint you on a regular basis and some of them will
- 03:36
draw demeaning caricatures of you in their notebook but beyond the actual
- 03:40
classroom headaches are the ones that will be incurred by your superiors your
- 03:44
school's principal the district's superintendent whatever nutjob is
- 03:48
currently heading up the Department of Education and then there's the teachers [man with a squirrel head]
- 03:51
union well they make you pay a lot of dues the taxpayers and a whole lot of
- 03:55
politicians hate them and you're not really sure if they know what they're
- 03:59
doing the laws of the country seemed to always be changing and the whole thing [laws thrown into trash]
- 04:02
seems like a mess but for all the headaches the stress isn't that bad like
- 04:06
you may have a lot on your plate and plenty of people depending on you but
- 04:10
it's not like if you forget to grade someone's test paper they're gonna die
- 04:14
on an operating table low stress so yes education is important but the
- 04:18
day-to-day stakes are manageable certainly relative to other
- 04:21
professional careers alright here's a pro the money isn't as bad as you think
- 04:24
let's say your base salary is 58 grand a year unless you live in rural Iowa or
- 04:29
some other pastoral location where 58 grand is actually a lot of money your [cows in field]
- 04:33
family is probably scraping by on that relative pittance but it doesn't tell [family eating a Hershey's bar]
- 04:38
the whole story you've got health benefits like exceptional health benefit
- 04:42
Thank You union negotiators like 10 grand or more in value a year medical
- 04:46
dental vision psychiatric pet care it adds up it's good stuff and you've got a
- 04:51
pension fund called the Cloverdale where most schools contribute something like a
- 04:55
grand a month to that fund for you once you're established as a long-term
- 04:59
teacher you've got partial use of a secretary or admin or two so throw in
- 05:04
another five grand or so in value there you might only technically be making
- 05:08
fifty eight grand a year in salary that you can spend today but remember that
- 05:12
the state is quote forcing you unquote to put away 12 grand a year in savings
- 05:17
each year for a long time so you should have pretty decent
- 05:21
retirement dough think about it that 58 grand figure that's in your head is
- 05:25
completely false in fact to keep you employed you're actually costing the
- 05:29
state or taxpayers or whatever private school foundation is writing the checks
- 05:34
closer to a hundred grand a year to pay you that fifty-eight and that's for
- 05:38
about eight and a half months work with almost no weekends and all that isn't
- 05:42
including any extra summer school work you take on or bonus pay for coaching
- 05:47
football prepping the speech team or directing the student-written play why
- 05:51
I'll never make my parents happy so considering how much you take on and
- 05:55
what part of the country you live in you can actually carve out a nicely decent [saw carves money pile]
- 06:00
financial niche for yourself and your odds of hanging on as a teacher well
- 06:03
pretty good unless have video surfaces of you doing unsavory things to an
- 06:08
airline mire flask your job is safe and even if you are a poor teacher well
- 06:14
you'll just get moved to a poor school it's kind of how things work in the
- 06:17
teaching game unless of course you're tenured ie your job is protected because
- 06:21
you've been teaching forever without major incident in which case well they
- 06:25
really can't touch you would do anything to you okay so what does a teacher do
- 06:29
all day well don't they just magically appear at 8 a.m. for
- 06:32
first period and then justice magically vanish when the final bell rings well [teacher appears and disappears in a puff or red smoke]
- 06:37
they're not actual people with actual lives are they as someone who is likely
- 06:41
a student yourself you know roughly what a teacher does during work hours they [woman in grocery store]
- 06:45
stand up in front of the class and write important names and dates on a
- 06:48
whiteboard they pass out pop quizzes and evil gleam in their eyes they ask you to
- 06:53
stay after class just so they can exert their power and terrify the bejesus out
- 06:58
of you you're not going to college you're going straight to the TSA but
- 07:01
what about in the hours after the school day ends you've heard a woman's work is
- 07:06
never done yeah okay a little outdated in a lot
- 07:09
sexist but when it comes to teachers well it's a true statement a teacher's
- 07:13
work really is never done so say a typical teacher has 25 kids in her
- 07:16
classroom if each one has either taken a test or submitted an essay on a given
- 07:21
day okay let's make it 24 because it'll be a cold day in hell when Tommy [boy sleeping in class]
- 07:25
giardiniera does a lick of work that's two dozen tests slash papers you've got
- 07:29
to sit down and go through with a fine-tooth comb you can't just do a
- 07:32
quick skim job these kids put a lot of time and after it into studying for
- 07:37
their quiz or researching their paper and there's plenty riding on the grade
- 07:40
you give them for each of them the grade could be the difference between getting
- 07:43
into Yale or taking over their dad's rubber chicken business so you owe it to
- 07:47
your students to give long thoughtful consideration to everything they've
- 07:51
written which can take hours if you're a good teacher or 15 minutes if you're
- 07:55
either a bad teacher or a jaded teacher who used to be good and then you have to
- 08:00
prepare for the following day if there's a lesson or a lecture to be given you've
- 08:03
got a plan for it you can't just get up there and wing a speech about the Boston
- 08:07
Tea Party for 45 minutes if there's another test to be given you have to
- 08:11
create it type it up print it out draw cute little winking emoji in the corner [teacher preparing for class]
- 08:16
of each one to relieve some of the pressure you know could be another
- 08:19
couple hours but totally doesn't have to be you could just pull up a lesson plan
- 08:23
from shmoop in 30 seconds Food for Thought people anyway this is all [Shmoop website]
- 08:27
assuming that you didn't have to coach or direct or lead some after-school
- 08:30
intensive woodworking seminar so yeah while teachers typically clock out at
- 08:35
around 3:00 p.m. they generally don't clock in to bed until 10 o'clock or so
- 08:39
usually after experiencing in excess amount of eye strain well the good thing
- 08:43
is that you aren't going it alone there's almost a war like camaraderie [teachers in military uniform gather together]
- 08:47
among teachers you all know what every other teacher well and your department
- 08:51
at least does and you lean on each other so there's a good support system there
- 08:59
when the school superintendent is cracking down on the use of purple chalk
- 09:03
in classrooms your fellow teachers will have your back well when it comes down
- 09:07
to it there are two types of teachers those who color inside the lines and
- 09:10
those who venture outside of them you can totally beat one of the teachers who
- 09:13
stays inside the lines your students will probably pass their tests your
- 09:17
principal will give you a pat on the back and you will be well on your way to
- 09:20
becoming tenured but you probably won't be remembered you might add a little
- 09:24
value to some kids lives but you won't dramatically change them for the good if
- 09:28
you can on the other hand be one of the teachers who isn't restricted by the
- 09:31
usual rules and guidelines well who will act out the entire Gettysburg Address
- 09:36
rather than just tell you about it or take you all outside to blow up an
- 09:40
ostrich egg on the football field or flat-out tell you to question authority
- 09:44
and not even take anything they're saying for granted well then you've got
- 09:48
a shot at being a formative figure in the lives of some impressionable youth
- 09:52
who are just dying to have their sponge-like brains filled and when all [information going into student's brain]
- 09:56
is said and done you will be rewarded in the hereafter if you believe in such a
- 09:59
thing for your noble work and sacrifice without teachers there would be no
- 10:03
passing along of knowledge without teachers there would be no inspiration
- 10:07
to innovate without teachers so there would be no snub so yeah thanks for
- 10:11
making education a priority and for keeping us in business
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