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Teachers get a salary, a yearly salary with benefits that run the entire school year. The actual number of days they work is in the neighborhood of ~170. Let's contrast that with Mr. and Mrs. America. 365 days in a year, minus 104 for weekends, 10 for holidays and 10 for vacation. This means that the typical American works 241 days.

So, let's compare salaries based upon work days. Let's not go into the triviliaties of which degree is rougher, education, chemistry, bio-sciences, physics, engineering, law and such. Let's stick to the numbers.

Teachers work a theoretical 170 days, everyone else gets 240. So Teachers work 170/241; or 70.5% of what everyone else works. But wait, that's not fair. Teachers also get vacation time during the school year, because spring and fall break, a month off over Christmas and 3 months over the summer are not enough.

Allowing for this, we find that teachers actually work about 33% fewer days than anyone else. An added plus, is that after as few as 3 years, they cannot be fired - no matter how poorly they perform their job. Wouldn't that be nice?

Or, you could go here and see how rough they have it.

Imagine, paid more than a comparable state worker, getting 15 weeks of paid vacation a year, and having tenure after just 3 years.

In Colorado, the summer break is 9 weeks, not 12 weeks. With break periods (fall, spring, winter), Colorado has 13 weeks off. However, teachers have very generous leave policies for personal days and sick days. I believe that teachers can even take vacation days during the regular teaching period. Recently, the mother of my daughter’s friend took a one week vacation. I was surprised because she is a first grade teacher. I do not think that the vacation was anything special like a wedding. She just took one week with her husband for a Mexican vacation.