Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Teachers should be rewarded with incomes comparable to those of doctors, lawyers or business leaders. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
你是否同意以下的观点?教师应该得到与医生、律师以及企业领导者类似的工资。请用具体的理由和事例来说明。
In 2009, David Tepper, manager of Appaloosa Management, received a salary of four million dollars. A brain surgeon will make anywhere between 150,000 to 270,000 dollars a year. An established lawyer can charge $400-500 an hour. Meanwhile, the professionals who have the greatest influence on these future fund managers and surgeons and lawyers-their teachers-make, on average, around $67,000 a year. This is a gross inequality of reward for service. Teachers deserve to be paid more-much more.
Some people may point out that teachers do not have the same long work hours as many of the other professions. These people don't know what they are talking about.Yes, a typical public school teacher may appear to be working only during the hours that school is in session (nine to three PM on average), and may take the entire summer off. But in reality, teachers work many long hours before and after school-prepping for their classes, grading papers, designing exams, and so forth. If not teaching summer school (to try and bring in a few more dollars), many teachers are themselves attending classes to achieve an advanced degree (and thus a bump in salary)。 If one does the math,assuming a teacher works at least 40 hours a week for most of the year (with two weeks off for vacation), that's a total of 2,000 hours. At $67,000 that's $33.50 an hour. (Plumbers make more than that.)
If we wised up and started to pay teachers what they are REALLY worth, we would have much better teachers. As it stands now, the U.S. ranks well below other countries in terms of student achievement in math and science. This is no surprise: Really brilliant mathematicians and physicists are probably going to seek their careers in the private sector, where they can command much higher salaries than what public school teachers get. But what if we offered our high school teachers $350,000 a year in salary? If we could populate our schools with the best and the brightest teachers, surely we would then see a significant increase in students'test scores. With such attractive salary levels,we could also afford to be very discriminating about whom we choose to teach our children; this in turn would make it even more likely that students in every part of our country, urban and rural, would receive a superior education.
“Teaching is not a lost art,” said historian Jacques Barzun, “but the regard for it is a lost tradition.” Let us strive to rediscover our regard for teachers by paying them appropriately.