re: Yearly Teachers are Complaining about their Vacation Being Over

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Their job is to teach kids a subject. Not diagnose their mental health, comment on their private home life,

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I bet 95% of all teachers grades 1-8 would agree with you. Unfortunately (I can only speak for California where my daughter is an English teacher at an inner-city middle school where over 50% of her students do not speak English and a large percentage of her students have parents that are incarcerated or just do not exist in their children's life) the state's broken education and mental health systems and lack of parental leadership has dumped this right in the teacher's laps.

In many cases teachers spend way more time with their students than the student's parents do, thus making the teachers both the first and last line of defense for these students when they start heading down that slippery slope. In quite a few school districts in California teachers are also expected to use their own money to purchase classroom supplies and donate time (without extra pay) to help special programs to be staffed). Also most teachers that I have been around spend a large part of their summer vacation (which in most California school districts is just about 7 weeks) working on their lesson plans (without pay) for the following school year.

One thing I do agree with is that those who are teachers have chose this profession, it was not forced upon them. They needed know what they were getting into before they accepted the job. I also think that as with any profession or job, those who view it as their calling do the least amount of bitching and the most amount of working.

Finally, there is one thing that I have found extremely interesting being around my daughter and other teachers from the school she teaches at; is that the majority of them detest the tenure system. Granted as with too many schools in troubled or impoverished areas, the teaching staff at her school probably averages 12 years or less time on the job, yet the majority of them believe that teachers should be rewarded by merit and not tenure (Teachers receive tenure usually after their 3rd year).