[Snapolit1]

I am actually always the guy defending teachers. I think it's beyond bizarre that people get their hackles up about a young guy or girl beginning their teaching career getting paid $21,000 a year, but no one seems to mind much that people are starting at an investment bank at five or ten or twenty times that and doing who knows what. Maybe it the whole summers off thing, but I see my brother grading papers on the weekends, making plans on the weekend, and always going the extra mile. It's a lot of hours if you care about what you are doing. As a society we think teachers of young kids are supposed to be both amazing babysitters and incredible educators, yet we treat them like second class citizens. Here where I live the teacher's unions haven't done them a whole lot of good (e.g., you can't fire the guy who inappropriately touched the kid without 27 hearings and have to keep him in a room somewhere collecting checks), but that's a different diatribe entirely.