A potential teacher’s math homework

"Yes...yes I do." 

http://zenpencils.com/comic/124-taylor-mali-what-teachers-make/

Here’s a math word problem to consider:

“ A teacher makes x amount of money. If rent is $600 a month, car payment and maintenance $250 a month, food and gas $500 a month, student loan payments $300 a month, phone bill $150 a month, cable and internet $100 a month, and insurances $400 a month, how much would a teacher need to make to put away a solid $8,000 a year for miscellaneous expenses and savings?”

Answer: $35,000

As a potential English teacher, please don’t hate on the hastily created word problem and budget. I’m not great at math nor am I great at budgeting my life yet (but it certainly got me seriously thinking about my expenses)

As a new teacher, that figure above is about what I’ll make for my first few years of teaching. I’m not at that point in my life where that number actually makes sense so I have to break this down into the value I’m most accustomed to: dollars/hour.

(The following calculations get confusing so bear with me on my rationale here)

A typical person earning this wage works 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year. That means 40 hours times 52 weeks or 2080 work hours. If during that year this person earns $35,000 for 2080 work hours, that equates to $16.82 per hour.

(40 x 52 = 2080)

($35,000/2080 = 16.82)

To be fair, teachers work about 180 school days a year. Readjusting our calculations, this means teachers make about $24.30 an hour, albeit the pay is spread to cover the entire year (woo, paid summers off?).

Now that seems like a nice sum considering minimum wage is $8.25 and I am currently earning $11.00 at my part time hospitality job on the Strip (visit me at Margaritaville anytime, folks). However, I clocked myself grading essays at about 2 minutes a paper. (Here it  comes! More math!) 

This means…

For a typical class of 30, there are 30 essays to grade. However, I will have about 5 classes so (30 x 5) I will have 150 essays to grade. At 2 minutes an essay, that’s (150 x 2) or 300 minutes of work AFTER CLASS or (300/60) 5 hours of extra work. On the list of things teachers do outside of the 8 hour class day include: lesson prep, grading papers, extracurricular activities, parent-teacher conferences, professional development, etc.

At this point, I’m pretty much burned out of numbers and figuring things out for now. All this began because I was curious about what my friends were making with their post-grad careers. Ranging from IT to Non-Profit organizational work, I wanted to know how the numbers fit in with my teaching career. I’m hoping the above thought process broke it down, but really it all boils down to this comic. I highly suggest reading this while listening to the original poem being recited as it displays some powerful emotions behind the passions of teaching which I hope to address in a future post. 

I think all the numbers are just getting to me. If you have any thoughts on what you or I make, please leave a comment!