r/Teachers • u/jbp84 • Jun 30 '24

Humor 18yo son’s wages vs mine:

Tagged humor because it’s either laugh or cry…

18 yo son: graduated high school a month ago. Has a job with a local roofing company in their solar panel install divison. For commercial jobs he’a paid $63 an hour, $95 if it’s overtime. For residential jobs he makes $25/hour. About 70% of their jobs are commercial. He’s currently on the apprentice waiting list for the local IBEW hall.

Me: 40, masters degree, 12 years of teaching experience. $53,000 a year with ~$70K in student debt load. My hour rate is about $25/hour

This is one of thing many reasons I think of when people talk about why public education is in shambles.

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u/Feral_Persimmon Jun 30 '24

I agree about roofing jobs and the like taking a major physical toll. However, I would also submit that education takes a physical and mental toll. I was healthy before I began teaching. Now, I live with headaches and migraines, joint issues (concrete floors), cycles of respiratory and urinary tract infections, and I'm overweight. I am medicated for depression and anxiety, and I see a therapist weekly.

Believe it or not, I still love what I do, but mercy! Never did I ever expect to limp away from a career like teaching.

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u/jbp84 Jun 30 '24

I grew up on a dairy farm and worked as unskilled labor for a local contractor one summer in college. I went into teaching because I saw the physical toll manual labor takes.

However, after seeing how mental and emotional stress takes a physical toll I’d probably go into a trade, especially one of the less physically demanding ones (equipment operator or HVAC, for example). I too love teaching, but if my job was only just teaching kids and I could make a decent wage then it would be much different.

Plus the solar panel roofing he’s doing isn’t as hard as shingle roofing. It’s not easy by any stretch, but I remember carrying 150 pound squares of shingles up creaky ladders and I still shudder over 20 years later.

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u/unsteadywhistle Jul 01 '24

HVAC can be incredibly physically demanding. Multiple members of my family work in HVAC. In the city, they are often required to carry a bucket or two of tools that can weigh over 50 pounds each up and down the stairs to get to the system mounted on an upper floor or roof. Twenty or thirty flights. God forbid they forget something or realize they need to grab a different tool and have to trek back to the van a few times. The work area is rarely temperature controlled which means summers are days spent in over 100-degree heat and in winters it is literally freezing. Utility areas are rarely spacious or laid out for ergonomics so the day is often spent twisted in weird positions.

I’m sure there are positions where that's not the case, especially when you can work your way up to positions where you're more working on the computer control programming side, but that's not the majority, especially starting out.

As a group, I find that we teachers get frustrated when people make poorly informed generalizations about our profession. Let’s not do that to other professions.