The Pros of Teaching: A. There’s More to Life Than Your Salary: While it is true that the pay is (and stays) relatively low, tea
chers usually don’t starve. Being a teacher means having a modest and humble lifestyle, but not being impoverished. If nothing else, the pay is reliable; no one budgets better than teachers who get paid the same amount once a month and have to make that paycheck last right up to the next one. Besides, there are many other (non-monetary) compensations for the low pay. B. The Many Benefits of Teaching: 1. Strong, Supportive Union and Collegiality Teaching can be a lonely profession, trapped in a room day after day with everyone far younger than you, but in other ways teachers are not alone and very well-supported. Many states have powerful and influential teacher’s unions that look after teachers’ best interests. Also teachers often develop strong supportive friendships that make the burdens of the job weight a little lighter. 2. Those Famous “Summers Off” and Other Holidays The benefit that everyone who is not a teacher knows about is the “summers off.” While it is true that teachers do have a summer break, it gets shorter every year—and often teachers (to make up for their low pay) have to take other jobs while not in the classroom. Still, when you add up the number of days a teacher gets off per year and compare it with another job that only gets two days for Christmas, you realize teachers do have an embarrassment of riches for holidays. C. Getting Paid in Personal Fulfillment: If teaching does indeed make you prematurely gray, it also (paradoxically) keeps you feeling young at heart. Being surrounded by young people discovering life, love, and joy year after year can keep a teacher’s heart light—the type of lightness that makes up for the lightness of one’s pocketbook. Ask teachers about their most wonderful day on the job, and they are sure to tell you about the day one student told them thank you for making a difference in his or her life. No price tag or salary could ever equal to that kind of fulfillment. Which statement BEST summarizes the section entitled, The Pros of Teaching? A) Being a teacher means that you get to have a lot of days where you don’t have to work. B) If you become a teacher, you will always have the teacher’s union and friends standing behind you in times of trouble. C) Teaching can be a very personally fulfilling job—even if you don’t make a lot of money, you can still get a lot of job satisfaction out of it. D) Being a teacher means having many benefits: personal job fulfillment, a strong union, supportive friends and colleagues, and many holidays and breaks off during the school year.
