Wow.

Unbelievable.


Questions like, "Why do teachers strike?" Why does anyone strike? Every employed or once employed person here knows that sometimes you have to draw the line. What happened when you were 8 years old and finally realized that the 50 cents your neighbor was giving you to mow the lawn was a bit under what it was worth? You stopped mowing their lawn. In effect, you went on strike. That's how employee / employer relationships function. That's how they've always functioned. That's how they'll always function.

Deal with it.

"Why do teachers ask for an outrageous raise?" Essentially the same deal. Just like buying a used car, you know the seller is going to ask more than what they expect to recieve for it, just like teachers ask for more than what they expect to recieve. Another classic American bargaining technique. Offers and counteroffers, that's the industry and economy of the United States.

Now personally, I don't think that levies have a damn thing to do with the subject of teachers wanting a raise. In fact, they don't have a damn thing to do with teachers wanting a raise, so I don't believe that they need to be mentioned in this post anymore.

How did any of us transition from being paid seven dollars an hour to a sufficient enough income to support our families? We needed a raise. In most cases, raises were given with experience or new job openings, sometimes you're just the best at what you do and you deserve more. Others had to go in and ask the boss for a raise or apply for a new position. Now this is one of the central differences between teaching and any other job. Good teachers don't get paid more than bad teachers. Teachers with 15 years experience don't get paid much more than teachers with 15 minutes experience, once you become a teacher, you can't be promoted up a floor and become an "executive teacher," or a CEO teacher, essentially you're always at the bottom. Because very few raises or opportunities to advance in the field are given, teachers must ask for a raise, whether it be to pay for housing, or greed, or because they think they're job's are becoming more difficult. I don't really care, it's just the way that the system works. You're either offered a raise, or you demand a raise, if you don't do that, you never get anywhere.

The 9 month vs. 12 month debate.

Very valid debate, kind of like whether it's better to work five eight hour shifts, or four tens. You could look at a person working tens and say, "Hey, that ******* only has to work 4 days a week and he still makes the same amount as I do when I work 5!!!" Do the math. Doesn't work that way, and neither does teaching. In my area, teachers are required to be at school from 8 AM to 4 PM. During those eight hours, there is generally about 15 minutes on each end which the teachers have to work on projects, un-hindered by the presence of pupils. How many 10 page papers could you read, edit, write comments on, and record in the grading system in 30 minutes a day?

I could grade one 10 page paper in 30 minutes. Maybe.

So lets say that a teacher two years ago had 32 students in his class. If he took half an hour per student to edit and grade their ten page paper, it would take him about 16 hours to complete his task. Sixteen hours is the equivalent of two full eight hour work days. There goes his weekend. Now lets say that this semester, the same teacher, earning the same salary, working the same job, but with higher taxes, fuel price, food prices, and rent, has 40 students in his class. He assigns the same assignment of a 10 page paper, except this time it takes him 4 hours longer to grade the papers, because he has another 8 students in his class. Why should he not be paid more? I don't really have a clue what any of you do, but I'd almost gaurantee that if you put in an extra 4 hours of work, on a weekend, then you would feel that you deserved more money than if you had not worked those extra 4 hours to be compensated.

I'd appreciate it if one of the teachers on the board could type for us a list of the classes he's taken in the last ten years, since being first hired as a teacher. These classes are taken in the summer, and REQUIRED by the employer. Well that really cuts into the old vacation now doesn't it??? So now what do we have? Say that the same teacher we talked about previously has 40 kids in his class, and a month long REQUIRED class coming up this summer. Now we have a man who works 40 hours a week, 20 hours on the weekend(more than two days work by industry standards), and a month long summer class. Add to that a contract which requires him to work a week after school gets out in the spring, and work a week before school starts in the fall, and what do you have???

A sixty hour work week for 9 months of the year with 40 kids running around.

A one month class in the summer, most likely also 40 hour weeks.

That puts us up to 10 months on and 2 months off.

Now subtract from that 2 months the week in the fall and week in the spring which the teacher is required to attend school without any students, and we're left with ten and a half months of work, and one and a half months of break.

Taking into account the sixty hour weeks during the 9 months which school is in session, having one and a half months off is really not very much, not much more time off than the average person would get by working 12 months a year with no homework on the weekends.

I'm not even going to start with the other responsibilities of a teacher, lesson planning, conferences, extra time spent with kids who need extra help. Don't think for a second that these duties don't add up to another easy 8 hours per week of "donated time."

I'm tired, so let me once again refresh the main points of all of this, attempting to answer the original question of, "why are they striking?"

Sometimes to get a raise, you have to go on strike. Ask millions of Americans who are a part of one union or another. They work just like you and I, and they want more money, don't tell me that you've never been un-satisfied with your pay.

They request an un-reasonable raise from the school district. Simple bargaining tactics, just like you or I would use when selling a boat, the seller asks more than he expects to get, the buyer counters with less than he expects to pay, they settle for a figure inbetween.

I've been trying to avoid throwing the classic, "And just think how important teachers are to your kids" line in here, but it does have a place.

Teachers don't sign any contracts which specify extra work hours, class sizes, or which courses in further education the school district will force them to take in the years to come. They do agree to a 40 hour work week 9 months of the year. Now you just think, hopefully understanding what I've written previously about a teacher's extra time spent outside the 40 hour week, and try to imagine how it would be if a teacher REFUSED to spend a second extra beyond the 40 hour a week contract.

If your child needed extra help after school, it would be REFUSED.

If you wanted to talk to your child's teacher when you got off work at 4 PM, it would be REFUSED.

If a teacher gave your child an F on and paper, and didn't take the time to comment on what to change or how to better it, then what? You can't learn without some help, and an F on a paper tells a child absolutely nothing about what needs to be changed or what he did wrong.

What this all boils down to is that teachers realize that in order to effectively do their job, they will have to give extra time to the students and to the program. Essentially, this is donated time outside of their 40 hour work week(how many of you get done with work on Friday and ask a little kid if he needs help learning to read?) Teachers know that they can just flunk a student if he can't read, and they also know that if they don't help that kid learn to read, then there's a good chance that no one else will.

So here's the deal. Teachers know that they'll work a bit of donated overtime, but if there are growing class sizes and fewer teachers, then teachers are expected to work more and more donated overtime. There will be a breaking point at which the teachers decide they're not getting paid enough. At this point, they go on strike, because you can be damn sure that no school district will say, "Oh, you look over-worked and underpaid, let me give you a raise."

So there you have it, they're on strike, they signed on willing to do a certain amount of work, and their bosses now want them to do more work. More work should equal more pay shouldn't it? I doubt that's a radical idea in anyone's book.

That's why teachers go on strike,

David