Allow me to start this by saying that I totally believe that the teachers in West Virginia and Oklahoma and wherever else the teachers are standing up against the government have legitimate concerns that need to be addressed.

But a lot of the rhetoric that is being tossed around is putting the teaching profession in a really bad place in terms of public relations.

First off, all the data that I’ve seen lately (which might be wrong because it’s all friend-of-a-friend on Facebook stuff from sources that I haven’t heard of) says that teachers in New York, California, and Massachusetts are averaging salaries of over $70,000 a year. That’s not investment-banking numbers of dollars, but that is certainly edging in on some of the “learn to code” professions. Especially since teachers get way more time off than a lot of jobs.

The people on the internet make claims about the amount of time off that teachers get, but both my parents were teachers, and I taught at several universities. Teachers get way more time off than other jobs do. WAY MORE. And a lot of them have summer jobs. My dad had a job every summer. A bunch of teachers that my mom worked with ran a contracting company, and they worked construction in the summers. They renovated our kitchen in the summer of 1987. The current principal of the high school that I attended has a second full time job as a sports agent. This is in addition to making (as the Wikipedia reports) $141,444 a year as the principal of Niskayuna High School. Teaching is hella flexible. School districts should be pushing this: Want a job that lets you run a business in your spare time? Try teaching!

Oh, what about all the prep time? Don’t know about the rest of the teachers, but I learned from my parents: Save your notes from the first time you prep a lesson, and it is way faster to prep the next time. Likewise with grading: There are a lot of valuable assignments that are easy to grade. Rely on those as much as possible. This I learned early: When I was in elementary school, I was grading exams for high school biology and chemistry classes.

The thing I really don’t get is all the money that teachers are spending on their classes. I don’t even know what they are spending money on. The only thing that I ever spent money on was dry erase markers, and a $30 box of markers was more than enough for an entire school year. You can buy a box of 5000 sheets of paper for $25. A box of 500 pencils runs about $35. I could easily teach a year of math to hundreds of students for less than $125 worth of supplies.

So instead of having all of this negative news out there about the teaching profession, there should be more good news to get more good people into teaching. In states that care about education, teaching pays at least as much as some jobs in tech (I can say this because I know how much some of my friends with entry-level tech jobs are being paid and how that compares to entry-level teacher salaries in California). Teaching is really flexible. You don’t need to sit in a chair at a desk all day. Almost everyone at work who is acting like a child is an actual child and can sort of be excused for being that way.

If word gets out that these are actual good jobs (in the states that care), then the states that don’t care will have a much bigger reason to worry about losing their teachers to other states.