The whole point of life is to do what you want to do and there aren't many people that are lucky enough to be doing what they like at work.  Anyone with a brain would rather be spending time with family and friends than working.  And you would want time off now, while you're young rather than make a lot of money early and retire in your fifties perhaps, when who knows what you health will be.

So why aren't more people getting jobs like school teachers.  As a public school teacher, if you're in a suburban area and some city areas you are paid well and if you have kids, you're off almost everytime they are.  You also:

1. Get almost every state and federal holiday off
2.Have most every weekend off
3.Christmas to New Year's off
4.A week in the spring off
5.May have off mid June to Mid August if you don't teach year around or summer school
6.Tenure (job for life)
7.Good pension
8. Have to deal with obnoxious kids and equally obnoxious parents.[:D]
If you teach mathematics, you could conceivably be using the same text book you used twenty years ago.  And the same tests and lesson plan. (math hasn't changed much in the last few centuries).[:D]
Feed multiple choice tests in a machine to read the results.

My high school history teacher last time I looked, made over $100K and is likely close to retirement.  If you're in a rural area w/o a large tax base, then things are probably different.

Why would anybody choose higher pay, when the whole point is to get time off?

What other jobs give decent pay with a lot of time off?

$100k!!! Dream on...  Rookie teachers have a fairly high starting salary compared to the salaries at other types of positions.  The difference ends there, as their pay goes up extremely slowly, whereas salaries in other careers can multiply quickly based on responsibility/performance.  I guess this makes sense as a teachers job doesn't really change year to year.



Because the time off is worthless, if all it does is give you more time to dwell on how you will take care of your debt and incoming bills.  A balance is best!  You need money to enjoy your time off!

Teaching requires a BS and sometimes an MS in the most watered down Mickey Mouse curriculum imaginable, which can result in a relatively high paying job where you only work 185 days per year.

The problem is finding a nice position in suburban Whitelandia where you don't have to spend your day screaming at kids who have no concept of what an authority figure is and dodging stray small arms fire in the parking lot.

I think the point is to be happy, not to get time off. In fact, I'd suggest that if it's your goal to get time off, you will probably never have high pay OR a lot of time off.

Anyway, how many public school teachers are really happy? How could they be? They work for low pay for a big bureaucracy, with poorly-behaved kids that have no respect for authority. They have a shoestring budget, and their union is run by flaming liberals.

My wife has been a school teacher for 13 years and she makes 42k. I've never heard of a public school teacher making 100k. A principle maybe, but not a teacher. I think your teacher is yankin' your chain or he's got something going on the side.

I know of a lot of Wisconsin teachers that are in rural areas and aren't obviously paid as well, but still make a good living that are teachers so they can do what they like in the summer.  They like to fish, so they guide in the summer to make a little extra income and are having fun, because they would be out fishing by themselves anyway.  I imagine this happens elsewhere too.

He's been teaching 29 years.  His 2001-2002 salary was $99749.  I was a little off.[:D]
This public info. is on the internet for my area and I will try to find it again and provide a link later.

There have to be some other jobs with some decent time off.

Work less than half the days of the year (teachers teach 180 days a year in this state and have plenty of days off for personal or sick days during that time), make over $35k starting-out, have a steady schedule, and get off from work in the middle of the afternoon, what's not to like?  I've got several relatives that teach, and they all make more money and have many times the # of days off as the engineers in my family.  They're also employeed and can get a job most anywhere they decide to live.  Out of the seven younger EE's in my family, the four that have jobs live places they don't like, and the other three have been looking for jobs for over a year.

Back to the original quesiton, I'd say high pay is more important.  Time off for vacation isn't worth much if you can't afford to take the time off.z

Well I have neither, so...

I say time off is more important. High pay usually means high stress and long hours, i.e. BURN OUT.

Time off. I take as much "unpaid time" away from work as the boss will allow me to take (5 days per year).

I work to live not live to work.
I'll take more time off ant day of the week.
My family and time with them is worth more to me than any extra hours or kissing asses to show I'm a company guy by working longer hours.

Please do, as that's just not believable.

Not to rain on your dream, but you are not the first to try and find this elusive dream situation.   Many have looked before, and many will look in the future.  It just doesn't happen.  

GOOD teachers put a lot of time in at home.  Those that do not, are usually incompetent, or are pacing the class at his/her speed, rather than the proper speed.

Part of the lure of government employment is the stability.  In fact, this, and a great health/dental/insurance plan are used to counter the "underpaid" theme.  I remember in the late '90s that teachers (and other public employees) were bitching that they were underpaid, and they couldn't take advantage of this or that that the private sector had...  Funny how they all shut up completely when the private sector started tossing people on the street.  They wanted to share in the reward, but not the risk...

Every career has its advantages and disadvantages.  Money may not be able to buy happiness, but it sure can take the sting off misery!

It depends if you live to work or work to live.

Payscales for a suburban district near me top out in the mid-high 90's for a teacher with an assload of experience and a masters.

This is the main site:  [url]http://thechampion.org/schools/salaries.asp[/url]

Top Teacher salaries in my area:  [url]http://thechampion.org/teach2002/TopTeach.asp[/url]

Top Administrator salaries in my area (unbelievable):  [url]http://thechampion.org/teach2002/TopAdmin.asp[/url]

Admittedly, the NE IL area is a generally upper middle income area with the usual overpriced housing, (I currently live with my parents[:D]), so things in rural areas w/o much of a tax base will be very different.  Almost 70 percent of our property taxes go to education here, in addition to state and now with Bill Clinton and President George Bush and Congress using more from federal income taxes, that money comes too.

Edited to add:  Holy crap!  I just looked up my sophmore year PE teacher that also has 29 years, and a Master's.  $100,004 last year!

I should've taken up teaching.  Of course the cost to get the Master's (which is, ironically high because of [i]college[/i] [i]teachers[/i] and [i]administrators[/i] and other college expenses, is a big thing to figure in, or take out of earnings, at least temporarily, (until you pay it off).

Jeez, these teacher salaries listed are unreal. In South Carolina, only a district superintendant would come close to those salaries. School principals would not make that much, except for maybe a handful of VERY senior principals at the largest urban mega high schools, even then it would be in the very low $100k range. If classroom teachers are raking in that kind of money in Illinois, it is only because of a powerful union, not the tax base or anything like that. There are high income, high tax areas in SC as well, but because there is no union, the salaries remain low.

Probably a combination of the two.  As a Govt worker you get 3 weeks vacation time and 104 hrs of sick leave every year.  [:)]  Plus with big govt, you will probably always have a job.

No ones last words were ever "I wish I spent more time at the office".

Bob

That's easy, time off. I can always work harder/faster and make more money.
AB

I got a lot of time off during my army career; 30 days vacation a year and lots of 3 and 4 day weekends. During Christmas week we worked day on, day off. We got every holiday there was off.

Now I manage a retail store and work 70 to 90 hours a week for days on end. I might take one or two days off a month. The reason I put in so many hours is because of the volume of business we do, and the reluctance of upper management to put more heads on the payroll in an effort to increase profits by reducing expenses. I have been doing this for three years now and honestly don't know how much longer I can keep on going.

My grass goes uncut and my fence goes unpainted. I hardly see my family anymore. I long for the days when I could waste an entire day just lounging in a chair reading a book...

Panzer Out

 You have to hit a middle ground.I once had a neighbor named Harriet who died. She was cool though and one day she told me "When you're old and lying on your death bed, you'll never look back and say "Gosh, I wish I had worked more".
 She's right.

For sanity purposes I would think time off.

Time off is great, but if you get payed ALOT more at what else you can do, that's great.

Being a college professor must be better. My Cisco instructor (we get that crap in my highschool) teaches at a college (also Cisco) for something like an hour and a half a day and makes as much as he does putting in a full day in my high-school.

Let's see... I work as a firefighter. Last year I made around 57k with overtime and incentives (base pay is about 49k). If I took the time to study for promotion I could earn something like
59k as a Lt. and 68k as a Capt. (base pay). I'm really not a money person so for me the real beauty is the time off.

I work a 24hr schedule (24hrs on, followed by 3 days off). With vacation time, personal days, admin days. I report for duty about 72 days a year. If I wanted to work a side job, I could probably make another 15-20k.

The downside is I work weekends and holidays and if I live to see 70 I'll be doing better than most.

I'm single, comfortable and try to live within my means. I live for my time off and wouldn't have it any other way for twice the pay. Add to that the camaraderie and think of the guys I work with as sort of an extended family, I'd probably work for half of what I make (but don't tell my employer that [:)]).

Money can't buy happiness, but it sure can buy you a lot of good whiskey and foxy looking womenz to keep you from thinking about how miserable you are.

OTOH, you need time off to drink and play with the womenz.

Work is DEFINITELY the curse of the drinking class.