Sometimes I feel jealous of my friends who are teachers because they get summers off. I know they work all the time during the school year but at least they know there is a “reset” each year. Meanwhile in healthcare it is unrelenting. Which would you prefer?

don't unless they have PTO or a partner that can take care of home etc ... while they are off ... if not they will be working somewhere part time to make up for the money they are receiving from unemployment

Well for a while I worked as a school nurse and it was a pretty sweet gig. I loved having a regular work schedule and Summer's off. Even if the pay wasn't as great as other nursing jobs.

However I also live in a blue state where teachers are valued and paid pretty well. And you could choose to have your pay spread out through the summer. It varies from place to place whether or not you can do that but my district allowed it.

I think education sounds better now.

Honestly i would love summer off but unfortunately SOME teachers don’t get paid during the summer off day and they also have low pay during the school year. Teachers don’t get paid enough and don’t get enough credit for their hard work and dedication

I’m a RN, my daughters a teacher. They make peanuts during the school year. She always has a summer job so she is not off in the summer. I’d rather have the security of consistent pay.

I used to work as a school counselor and I’d much rather not. First off, they started to schedule trainings and things over the summer - so my “time off” was reduced off the bat. I was contracted and only supposed to work 7.(25 I think) hours a day and only so many mo hrs per year. I had to do lunch duty and drop off duty also. I had zero time to truly make a difference. Every day I was doing threat assessments and putting out fires. I had 190 voicemails when I left my role. I was 1 school counselor to 6, 7 and 8th grade.

Not to mention how litigious people are these days! The climate is not great with parenting expectations of the school and what the school can actually accomplish in a day.

Most teachers work well beyond what’s in their contract and are barely holding above water.

Just my experience 😂

Wife is a 28 year teacher. She has hated it for the last 13 years. Every year is the worst class ever. That let me tell you is relentless.

Summers off? Bwahahaha! My BFF is a teacher and yes there's a break from school, but that's 2 1/2 months she doesn't get paid. She's hustling big time during the summer months to stay afloat.

I spent 33 years working in healthcare, and eventually felt I needed a "reset" so, I retired. Soon afterwards I realized retirement was a bit too quiet for my taste, so I decided to try substitute teaching. Now, I often joke that I went from earning two $200,000 a year, to making $20 an hour, and honestly, I’ve never been happier! There's a time and a place for everything!

I have worked as a high school teacher, a college teacher, vice principal, and also in healthcare. There’s no comparison pay between healthcare and teaching in terms of pay. In California, it pays about two or three times as much to be an RT as a teacher. It’s probably four times more for nurses than for teachers.

Whether a person wants to be in healthcare or teaching has to do with temperament. The science courses, bodily functions and visceral aspects of healthcare are so different from teaching a group of students, whether at the secondary or the college level.

If you want more money and you still wanna make a difference, then you should do healthcare provided you can handle the physical aspects of the job. In either job, you absolutely make a difference in others’ lives — in teachinf, but you’re gonna do it making far less pay and using a very different set of skills. The parts of your brain that are activated in teaching versus healthcare are not entirely the same. I would say I loved both jobs and hated both jobs at different times, depending upon what was going on. For the most part, they both have pluses and minuses, and you need to make the most of your environment. Additionally, culture is important. Some schools are very toxic, and some hospitals are very toxic. If it all possible, get out of those kinds of environments.

Recently, I worked at a place that used to be amazing as a hospital, a series of changes leadership, it became a miserably toxic place. There are no words for how glad I am to have gotten out of that environment. One bad principal or one bad manager can make all the difference.

I was a teacher, and for most of those years, I needed a second job to get by. My two kids qualified for free lunch. How embarrassing! I studied healthcare part-time for years, and overlapped careers, waiting to qualify for the pension. When I went full-time into medical research, I made more money in three days than I did in five days in school, worked fewer hours overall, and was respected for my contributions.

As a nurse I have worked 2 jobs all year

I have the unique experience to be able to speak to both. I’m a nurse of 16 years, and spent the last 3 as a nurse in my local district. It’s not sunshine and rainbows in the school system. First, you get paid crap, and even though they give you your “hourly wage” that seems somewhat doable, then you realize you have to take about 25% off that if you‘re mandated to do spread pay as I was. So my very low hourly wage was in fact actually like 75% to cover all of the breaks and summers off. Then you’re also required to give up another 10% into the state retirement system. Several years ago before they passed the Windfall provision, any amount I was putting into the state retirement was just getting deducted from my social security benefits that I had already earned. It seems like even if you have the summers off, you’re honestly doing all kinds of work to stay afloat so when the doors open again in August you’re not drowning. If you think patients are awful, parents can be over the top. There are good ones, and also really bad ones. When you work in the school there’s so many rules you don’t have in the regular healthcare world. Although we had summers off, we weren’t permitted to take any vacation time in August, or May. If there was a long weekend such as MLK day, Presidents’ Day, or any obvious holiday we weren’t allowed to take off the day before or the day after. No Mondays or Fridays permitted off in several of the months. (These rules were all in place because of union agreements to there was no bending of the rules). You basically can’t use your time off ever! If given the chance I’d choose to work in the hospital over the schools any day. You are more respected, treated as though you’re an actual professional, and you can actually choose when you’d like to take off. So many kids these days are so disrespectful, and somewhat violent to the staff, yet you can’t defend yourself or do anything about it. For reference, as a nurse in the school, I worked 81% of the hours annually that I did in the hospital, and I only made 35% of the pay when comparing apples to apples. The teachers are more respected and paid better than the nurses, but when comparing from a healthcare standpoint I 10/10 DO NOT recommend working in the schools.

3 months is too long off without pay. Save your PTO and take a week off every 3-4 months. The work flow tends to slow down during the summer in my area so I would just rather have an easy work day than not work at all and be unpaid.

I am a nurse and I now work in higher education. I like teaching and I needed off the continuous hamster wheel of working in healthcare
I was burNed out..I like having summers off but honestly i don’t get paid enough, I get restless towards end of summer
Every has a trade off, i Also work once a week as a nurse to make meet

As a former teacher please dont make assumptions. Your comment was astonishing to me. Most teachers do work over the summer. Do you think they just show up a week before and prepare a years worth of quizzes, tests, and lesson plans. Hardly. Most have coaching responsibilities or club responsibilities. Ibtaight 5 years and took my students to Italy and the other summers, I picked up camps to teach because I MADE $25,000/YEAR! Educate yourself b3fore making such embarrassing comments. Thanks.

Teachers are 1 UNDERPAID
2. At the beck and call of the town
3. CONSTANTLY having to fight for their COLA / pay / health care
4. having to deal with parents "oh ! Not MY Johnny - he's never a problem
5. FORCE FED how they have to teach
6. Understaffed
7. Have to get their Masters within 4-6 years of start ( minimal compensation)
8. deal with children and have to actually TEACH the wee buggers something by the end of the day.
9. constant concern of being laid off.
10. you cant say things to kids- yet they can say any manner of nastiness to you... I've also had (teacher) pals hit by students, etc


if you really wanted, see if there are areas near you that hire you as a substitute teacher..... many districts cannot find enough people will ing to be a teacher. TRY it .... zYou might love it - You might hate it ....

A teacher, it’s the retirement and benefit packages they get.

I loved working in the school system, so I agree with you! I’m exhausted and there’s no reset even when I take a one week vacation. I’m self employed so if I don’t work I don’t get paid so I can’t really enjoy myself when I’m off because I know I won’t see a pay check.

Also I work in Healthcare and have cushy hours. When I was a teacher I was at the school by 6:30 am and home at 11 pm after coaching. Then stayed up half the night grading and my weekends were spent grading. Last I checked Healthcare workers usually get a day or 3 off. I didn't. Again as a teacher malijg 25k per year.