gehenna:

 

My wife works 10x harder than I do, and I get paid more than 2-3x as much.  She worked 65 hours last week.  The last 3 months have been hovering between 50-60 hours every day since she's been running things like school production, tutor groups, moderation, assessment feedback, and working on reports most evenings when she gets home. Plus at least 10 hours over the weekend.  At least.  

 

She's basically on-call 24/7 and a lot of her role is relationship management with parents. She's already reached the top of where her salary can go, there's no way she can get more money without taking on more responsibility (e.g. management units).  That means her top end is around the entry salary for an infrastructure engineer.  

 

She takes emails and txts from students from 3:30pm to midnight every day/night and all through weekends.  She's a counselor, a tutor, a mentor, and she's got to somehow process the emotions of 100+ teenagers while keeping herself sane, and on top of all her other commitments.....and still be able to have a life with me.  

 

She doesn't get annual leave, the school holidays are about 3 days of non-stop sleep at the beginning, followed by another week of having a cold or flu that she's been fighting off all term and finally got through because she let her guard down.  Then a week or two of catching up on work and planning for the next term. 

 

Going away is difficult since school holiday travel is peak prices everywhere.  Plus any time we do go away we inevitablly hear "Hello Miss" from a student who is holidaying at the same place as us.  Sick leave during term is a difficult to manage because she has to spend time creating relief for someone else to do if she's away, so more often than not it's easier just to keep working.  

 

She's also WAY more qualified than I am.  She has a conjoint degree and a teaching degree that took 4 years to complete in total.  She has to pay to be registered in order to teach, and she has to prove self-learning and continuous personal development to remain registered.  All I ever have to do to get a job is quote some acronyms.  

 

In my opinion, seeing what she does every single day (weekends and "holidays" included), she deserves at least as much as I'm paid in the corporate world, preferably much more.  I'm writing this while I work from home in my armchair while watching a YouTube video of someone playing Dead Space in 4K while she's probably done about 50 things already today, and when I'm playing another couple of hours of my latest fun game at 9pm tonight she'll still be working.

 

Anyone who thinks teachers have it easy and don't deserve our utmost respect and gratitude, and don't deserve ALL THE MONEY, can all get fired into the sun.  If that's you, you're a blight on our society.  

 

 

The most obvious question is why doesn't she resign and do what you do? She'll get to work a tenth of the amount and earn 3 times as much. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Mod Edit MM: Updating quote to reflect edits to original post.