Your going to listen to me complain

I am a teacher...Most of the time I love it, but more and more, with the children of the Milwaukee inner city showing a complete lack of any concern for learning, respect, responsibility, or just being a decent human being, I find myself more and more tired.

Today I had to get yelled at because kids in my class decided to leave my area to the place THEY wanted to go. In a normal world, this would not even happen. If it did, the students would be punished. But in this world, going after the students is worthless, because no matter what they do, they will not be punished.
Shortly after that, I put my gradebook down to get a drink of water, and someone stole it. It isn't the end of the world for my grades, but the fact that someone would steal it, showing a complete lack of regard for right and wrong, got me mad.
Then we had a basketball game at the end of the day, and the amount of disrespect and fighting that the students showed put me over the edge. These are people you try to help every day, staying up late doing lesson plans, grading papers, buying stuff for your room, and they swear at you, they have been taught by their completely wrong liberal upbringing that they are entitled to whatever they want, whenever they want. No one has the right to tell them what to do at any time, for any reason. It's bullshit.

Then I go to Jay's blog and read this, reminding me how little I am appreciated.

As a work force, teachers are highly educated compared with the general public.

Twenty-four percent of Wisconsin’s working population holds a bachelor’s degree or more compared with nearly 100% of teachers.

Only 8% of the state’s work force holds a graduate degree, compared with 57% of teachers (U.S. Census Bureau 2003, “Status of the Wisconsin Public School Teacher 2004”).

Census Bureau data which measure earnings by educational attainment show that teachers are underpaid compared with private sector workers who have similar levels of education:

The average full-time worker nationally with a bachelor’s degree over age 25 earned $60,664 in 2004—that’s $17,782 more than Wisconsin teachers, who earned an average of $42,882 (U.S. Census Bureau, “Earnings by Educational Attainment,” NEA “Rankings and Estimates”).

The average full-time worker nationally with a master’s degree earned $73,024 in 2004—that’s $30,142 more than Wisconsin teachers earned who have a master’s degree and 10 year’s experience (U.S. Census Bureau, “Earnings by Educational Attainment,” WEAC salary data).

Education Week magazine found that Wisconsin teachers earned $10,000 less than other workers in the state with college degrees (“Quality Counts 2000”).

Wisconsin teachers with a master’s degree earned $17,250 less than other Wisconsin workers with the same degree (“Quality Counts 2000”).

There's more at the link. Let's compare apples to apples, shall we? A highly-qualified, well-educated Wisconsin teacher does not easily compare to your average worker. (First person who says "but you get summers off" gets smacked; I haven't had a summer off since I was 16.) There's also this:

Several types of analyses show that teachers earn significantly less than comparable workers, and this wage disadvantage has grown considerably over the last 10 years.

An analysis of weekly wage trends shows that teachers' wages have fallen behind those of other workers since 1996, with teachers' inflation-adjusted weekly wages rising just 0.8%, far less than the 12% weekly wage growth of other college graduates and of all workers. [. . .]

A comparison of teachers' wages to those of workers with comparable skill requirements, including accountants, reporters, registered nurses, computer programmers, clergy, personnel officers, and vocational counselors and inspectors, shows that teachers earned $116 less per week in 2002, a wage disadvantage of 12.2%. Because teachers worked more hours per week, the hourly wage disadvantage was an even larger 14.1%.

Teachers' weekly wages have grown far more slowly than those for these comparable occupations; teacher wages have deteriorated about 14.8% since 1993 and by 12.0% since 1983 relative to comparable occupations.

Although teachers have somewhat better health and pension benefits than do other professionals, these are offset partly by lower payroll taxes paid by employers (since some teachers are not in the Social Security system). Teachers have less premium pay (overtime and shift pay, for example), less paid leave, and fewer wage bonuses than do other professionals. Teacher benefits have not improved relative to other professionals since 1994 (the earliest data we have on benefits), so the growth in the teacher wage disadvantage has not been offset by improved benefits.

The extent to which teachers enjoy greater benefits depends on the particular wage measure employed to study teacher relative pay. Based on a commonly used wage measure that is similar to the W-2 wages reported to the IRS (and used in our analyses), teachers in 2002 received 19.3% of their total compensation in benefits, slightly more than the 17.9% benefit share of compensation of professionals. These better benefits somewhat offset the teacher wage disadvantage but only to a modest extent. For instance, in terms of the roughly 14% hourly wage disadvantage for teachers we found relative to other workers of similar education and experience, an adjustment for benefits would yield a total compensation disadvantage for teachers of 12.5%, 1.5 percentage points less.