Challenger Elementary Community Day School: Fill & Download for Free

Yes and no.Was I massively underpaid as a HS teacher? I’m back and forth on whether or not to say what my salary was, but it was well below the median.I quit the field after the school board released the new schedule that they expected to be in place for the next thirty years, in part because I figured out that if:I lived within my present means,saw essentially no cost of living increase that wasn’t covered by the 1% annual cost of living increase the board hoped but could not promise us that we’d receive,got a master’s degree (they wouldn’t pay more for a doctorate,)got National Board certification,had my portfolio re-approved every three years,never incurred substantial debt with carried over interest,got married,had kids,bought a car more expensive than $5,000 every five years (and didn’t incur more than $1,000 a year in maintenance and repair costs,) orhave anything more catastrophic than a $1,000 a year unexpected expense crop up;I could expect to retire at age 80.I could shave three years off by working every summer school opportunity I got and doing my professional development work in the evenings. I could shave off another four years if I coached two sports a year; the forensics coaching I was doing paid $500 as a bonus contract, but I could make $2500 coaching football or track. I could take a few more years off perhaps by working weekends or evenings somewhere, which would have been difficult because I usually used that time to work on grading, lesson planning, etc.But the benefits…!Heh, yeah, no. I heard this all the time. That’s actually why teacher salaries are low, by the way - we typically have approximately 185 day contracts. That “three months paid vacation”… isn’t. It’s not paid. The health care benefits are often maybe a little better than certain private sector jobs, but in recent years, they’ve evened out a lot in most places as schools can’t eat the extra costs in lieu of salary anymore. Tack on the required continuing education, which is rarely if ever paid for, and all those “benefits” typically aren’t any better than most comparable private sector jobs.Now, not everyone faces the same salary challenges. I still have some friends in the field who have managed jobs at some communities with really solid tax bases or private schools that are extremely well-funded. One of those makes more in her seventh year than I make as an attorney right now, with some creative fringe benefits to get around some recent state laws intended to strip those fringe benefits away. She’s a very, very good teacher and worked hard to get that job from a pool of very competitive candidates. My brother-in-law got a substantial signing bonus and a significant raise to leave one semi-rural district and move over to a more urban district. And he’s earned that: he’s a really good orchestra teacher that has been able to coordinate incredible opportunities for his students.But if a district doesn’t have the tax base to attract those people? They’re going to get screwed.So many teachers are fleeing the field that it is getting a little easier to find a job these days, as compared to when I got in and there were on average 120 applicants for every available position.But rural districts are getting run through the pulp mill trying to find money to attract high quality teachers as state funding dries up more and more every year. Wisconsin passed a law putting revenue limits in place as well, so even if local communities want to, they often can’t raise property taxes to make up the difference. They can pass one-time referendums every year, but those are increasingly failing.Now, all that said, there is only so much the Federal government can do about that.As Matthew Bates points out, the Federal government doesn’t hire teachers. While Federal funding does make it to schools under things like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, local taxes and state aid make up the lion’s share of district funds.So, either Kamala Harris is just ignorant of that fact, or (and this is the more likely scenario,) she’s just pandering. It’s a cheap way to be on the side of public school teachers and sound pro-education. It’s an applause line in a stump speech.In fact, my problem with this pandering crap is that it actually prevents meaningful discussion of teacher pay at the state level, where it needs to happen. It becomes another sound bite in a sea of sound bites. Instead of having an actual debate by voters of how much to pay their educators, it just becomes another club to hit the teachers’ union with. I’m fed up to the back teeth with me and my old colleagues being used as some politician’s campaign prop.I agree with the sentiment. There are a lot of public school teachers that are being forced to work multiple jobs just to keep food on the table. Oklahoma went to a four-day school week so that teachers could have enough time to get second jobs. That’s frankly utterly shameful, and both the kids and the teachers deserve better.But I have zero faith in Harris’ ability to actually get anything of substance through Congress that would have any meaningful impact on that problem.Thanks for the A2A.

I presume you mean schools of substantial size, not a couple of dozen kids? Most likely you'll hear about Seattle Prep or Seattle Country Day School or Evergreen School in the city itself. My daughter is at Seattle Country Day and my wife and I-- as well as her parents, and really everyone we've met who's looked closely at it-- have been blown away by the quality and dedication of the teaching, as well as the strength and devotion of the community. The sheer audacity of some 3rd and 4th grade assignments, things I might have had an opportunity to try in high school, is amazing. And the kids absolutely rise to the challenges.

(THIS ONE WILL TAKE A WHILE, SO BEAR WITH ME)Did any of you ever have these disgusting capitalistic scummy pieces of paper in elementary school?:[math]Not actual moose dollars[/math]We did, except for us they were called moose dollars.Let me take you back to elementary school, to my third grade teachers class, where my criminal business began!!!!So it all started out in my third grade teacher’s class, we had her last year, but this year everything changed… You see last year we had moose money, but it wasn’t as big of a deal. This year our teacher, who I will call Ms. Rice, decided to make it more of a big deal by incentivizing us far more, so that she could use it for dealing with behavior problems, and as a way to make us more likely to try hard in her class.So starting 3rd grade 20 moose dollars could get you into a movie every Friday, and for 5 moose dollars you could buy back your recess if you misbehaved, but if you did that once, you would lose out on going to that movie on Friday. (Idk why I brought that up, cause it has no importance, but whatever). And once a month/Every 3–4 weeks our class would hold a “class fair” where we would sell things we made/services we had to students from every class. Now these students didn’t have a regular income of moose money, and so every class fair each student got 20 moose dollars. That meant that if these students came to our class for the movie they had to get money from us to come, and if they wanted more money for items and services, they had to save it.^What a table at said fair would have looked like, if you replaced the adults with^ childrenNow unless you were one of those kids you could earn money throughout the week. Every week there were a list of challenges you complete by Friday to earn Moose Money, and at one point when I did the math, the average kid would earn roughly 5 moose dollars from those. You could also earn them bi-weekly on math quizzes (5 moose dollars), and monthly on math tests (20 moose dollars), but only if you got an A.Now seeing as I resented having to work for this money, I wanted a way to make easy money. See my father is a Civics and Economics teacher, meaning that I understood the basic principles of supply and demand, and I also resented my teacher Ms. Rice because she would send me out of the class because I was louder, taller, and more annoying (possibly due to my ADHD), than my fellow students. So I planned.^Actual portrait of Ms. Rice^I started a “Spy Ring”. The real purpose of which was to take money from the richest people in the class. I had 5 people in my “Spy Ring” and each one was charged 5 moose dollars a week. Basically, I had another one of my friends start another one, and I created a bunch of drama by having my spies steal the other spies “passwords” and then copy them, and vice versa. In the meantime I spent my resources wisely.You see there was a high demand for movies in Ms. Rice’s class, and since all the cool kids were going, all the other kids were willing to go into debt in order to take their friends, and look rich. So I started loaning money with roughly 10% interest per week. The minimum I would accept payment in were 5’s, since 1’s were rarely used for anything. So knowing that let me do the math for you, that my scheming 9 year old self had come up with.1 kid asks for $20 so s/he can go to Ms. Rice’s Friday Movie, but he won’t have enough money to pay back until at friday after next, on a good week (for me), that means that by then he owes me $19 after payment. That’s right. He only payed off $1 of his debt.[math]20/10=2[/math][math]20+2=22[/math][math]22/10=2.2[/math][math]22+2.2=24.2[/math][math]24.2-5=19.2[/math]Each week I would lose roughly 40 moose dollars, but some people got smart and realized that I couldn’t possibly force them to pay up, until I realized what I was really missing, lackeys. So I went to my Spy Ring and got two enforcers, who were both smaller than me (to be fair I was pretty tall), but twice as strong (fat). After that I got my money much faster. By the end of my enforcers run, I had made roughly 800 moose dollars. (Of course, I had to pay my 2 helpful spy/enforcers, who got 100 moose dollars each)However, Ms. Rice caught on that not all of her money was making it’s way back to her, so I had to hide half of what I didn’t return to her evil redistribution scheme and spend it slowly.However my deviant age did not pass.No no no.You see, unbeknownst to me, the 5th grade teachers saw what was going on in Ms. Rice’s class, and copied it. Except they called it math money.By the time I was in 5th grade I had another plan.You see, my second from my spy ring had stayed my friend, even though there was no competing ring in 4th grade, so instead we spied on the teachers.Once we got into 5th grade we learned about math money, but this year there was another problem: Robbery. You see, unlike our 3rd grade counterparts, we had all experienced the 3rd grade Criminal Syndicate, and no one wanted to live under that, so people started to rob each other to gain the power. My solution was to start a bank/insurance agency. You could pay $10 a week, and if you were robbed, we would cover some of your money, or for a scaling fee, you could put all of your money into my lock box.^Benjamin Franklin, mascot of my bank/insurance company^You see, this was all a cover though, because my friend, I’ll call them Jaime, was the one stealing the most money, and needed a place to hide it. They were afraid of getting caught, so I decided to help them hide that money, for a little cover charge. I managed to convince half the class to join at list a little bit in the scheme, but then I ran into a problem.I knew Jaime couldn’t ever completely stop stealing, because then I would be implicated, and then I would get in trouble, and I also knew I couldn’t keep all my money in that safe because if the amount of money in the room stayed the same, then the teacher would know it was me (Also because then my service wouldn’t be in demand). So I decided to keep a flow of cash between classes.During recess, I started an underground playground Olympics. See it had just been the summer Olympics that summer, so everyone had a little bit of hype going on, so I organized some events, like monkey bars, basketball, soccer, etc. and offered a prize for the winning player/teams of each event. Each team paid an entrance fee, and won (most) of the money that went into each event.Unfortunately, not all of the teachers were stupid, so that got shutdown, and because of that, the thieving had to slowly stop, which meant I slowly lost my clients.(So there we have one ban already, get ready for me to do even more damage!)But I developed something much better, and much more addictive than sports.Gambling.You see, some of us got addicted to playing this dice game we called All or Nothing. The rules of all or nothing were simple, roll two 1’s, and you have to put all your money in the pool, if you roll a two 6’s you take all of the pool, if you roll anything else, you hand the dice to the person to your left. Everyone sits in a circle, and you have to bet on your turn. You lose when you don’t bet on your turn.Anyways, this was all just for shuffling money around the classrooms for my schemes (because I hated having these stupid incentivation programs), the biggest one was because of Jaime. See one day after Thanksgiving, she discovered that the teachers had whole sheets of math money, which was printed on a sheet of green printer paper. I made an investment of $20 on a sheaf of the same type of paper, and 4 of those sheets from the teachers room, which was used for the high level reading group, which I was a part of.So over winter break, I used my home copier/printer to print over $2000 of math money. Some of which I sold to other classmates who wanted to discreetly add to their accounts.Total I sold around $500 (math money), for $50 (legal us currency), which we split evenly between the two of us.What I didn’t know was my friend who had found the money had also been stealing sheets of it, and cutting it herself, unbeknownst to the teachers. But the teachers had started to notice that my class was becoming very wealthy. We spent more than average in class fairs. Also, we had double, or triple, what the well- behaved, good grade, students had; we shouldn’t have had that much, for obvious reasons.One day, some fucking snitch from our class saw that Jaime kept sneaking into the advanced reading room, for which she had no reason to be there. After a long and arduous process of yelling, Jaime called me in as a witness of her being in the classroom. Needless to say, when I was called in I fucking panicked. I saw Jaime and immediately assumed she had snitched, so when I heard that she had been spotted by the snitch I started laughing.Anyways to make an already long story far shorter, she got busted and I kept most, if not almost all of her math money, which I then gave to a 4th grader at the end of the year.FINEdit: 5k upvotes, holy shit!I've gotten some good recommendations for TV shows based off this answer, so here are my favorites:OzarkBlacklistWhite CollarThey're all available on Netflix, so feel free to check them out, and thank you to the people who recommended them!________________________________________________________________________________________________Edit because I found some stuff while cleaning my room (11/20/2020):At one point I got in trouble for loan sharking in 3rd grade, so what I ended up doing was offering loans to people by using their Yu-Gi-Oh cards as a “Security Deposit” if they ended up not paying me back, and then I would resell their cards to other people for the money they owed me.I actually got into serious trouble for that, and I almost got suspended because several students claimed I “stole” their cards. I got out of trouble because I had made sure they signed contracts with me, but those got voided by the school principal since he claimed that minors cannot sign legal agreements. That’s part of the reason there was so much chaos in my 5th grade class, because students remembered all of my (now defunct) schemes, and didn’t want to experience them again, hence why I was using Jaime as a business partner.Also some more questions I answered in a recent comment;What happened after Jaime got caught? Was she mad at you?Jaime got caught with a bit of the money, but she didn’t rat me out. She wasn’t mad at me, because I didn’t snitch on her, and we had a mutual understanding. I let her spend a bit of our money because she was one of two people who were my friends in elementary, and pretty much everyone including the snitch who ratted on Jaime, hated me. I think she got punished, but I’m not really sure what actually happened to her.Are you still friends with Jaime?We were good friends through middle school because we both went to a small middle school (only 120–130 people in our grade) and lived one neighborhood away from each other and didn’t know anyone else nearby, but in High School we stopped hanging out because we were in different social circles (And it was significantly bigger, with roughly 500 people in our class). We chat once or twice a year on facebook, but not frequently.Was the scheme ever found out?The scheme was never found out. Some people had a little bit of an idea what was happening at the time, but didn’t question it because we had more money than other classes. I ended up telling the story to a few people, and I have no idea what the 4th grader I gave the money to said about it, as we didn’t ever hang out again after elementary school on the bus, despite going to the same high school later on.Where did you get the idea for the original scheme?So the 3rd grade one (loan sharking) started by me hearing about how Walt Disney got conned out of his original cartoons by signing a bad contract, and quickly got out of hand. I used to ask my Dad questions about money and economics since we were studying it in school (like producers and consumers) but my dad had explained that there are also people who make lots of money through banking and finance, so I got a little inspiration from that. The 5th grade scheme was just an extension of that.Why didn’t you flood the market and destroy it?Well I wasn’t interested in destroying my only source of attention in that class, and also I didn’t have a firm grasp on the concept of inflation at the time. I suppose I realized that it would be possible to do that, because I had noticed prices for stuff getting higher in my class (hence why I used proxies to purchase stuff for me), but I also knew if I flooded too much money into the classroom that the teacher would notice since they occasionally printed new bills, and they were beginning to realize that there was too much money in circulation at the time.I remember hearing in 7th grade that they had to change the color of the bills and also the print on the math money, because they didn’t want that happening again, and they also required students to keep the money with the teachers after that, so that black and grey market deals weren’t happening. Thank god I wasn’t there.Do you work in finance or something like that now?No. I hate math. I’m currently in Community College right now, and I’m not sure what I want to do, but I love STEM (minus the M part), and I might persue something in that field, or just do business and then go to law school. I did a lot of speech and debate and High School, and I love arguing and memorizing facts and such. Not really sure at the moment what I want to do though.The math doesn’t really make sense?Yeah, like I said, I’m bad at math. I wasn’t really doing percentages at the time, I was tacking a fixed amount of money based off a fraction of the total owed each week. The math I used to justify it in this answer was done while writing this answer, and I hid my the book that I used for keeping track of the loans after I got in deep shit, so I have no idea where it is. I think I remember shredding pages at one point because my parents got a little pissed.Are you a libertarian?No, I’m more of an Anarchist.Thanks for your praise and continued support on this answer! It was one of my favorite writing pieces I’ve ever done, and I really appreciate y’all!