Yes, but they get great fringe benefits (early retirement, defined benefit pensions) and easy hours. The salaries aren't even that bad if you multiply by (12 months of pay / 9-10 months of work). The underpaid teacher is a myth.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf
http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_be...
When you just look at hours in the classroom it doesn't look that hard. But add in the time for grading and preparing classes, and you find that teachers work long hours.
I don't have any statistics on it, but http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_hours_per_week_do_teacher... is in line with the anecdotes that my mother and sister have given me about how much work teaching is.
The hours in the classroom are the hard part. You have to be on your feet actually interacting with kids who don't want to be there for 6-7 hours a day. God help you if you are teaching them something they instinctively hate, like math. The grading and prep is time consuming but not a big deal, you can just do it at home while doing something else. It's low prestige, and the pay is lousy. The pay becomes tolerable if you can stand doing it for 15 years while paying for bogus master's degree classes during the summers. I decided to abandon my bleeding heart and go back to graduate school in computer science. Note: if you want to get paid more off the bat, the trick is to get a master's degree right away and become a special-ed teacher.
In contrast, at almost every programming job I've had there were weeks where I spent 6-7 hours a day doing fuck-all, going to meetings, reading websites, chatting with friends and checking in 10 lines of code and updating the ticket tracker. For this service to humanity I get paid 4 times as much as I did educating the nation's youth.
But I'll certainly take your 2 secondhand anecdotes and some random internet guy over a scientific survey done by the BLS.
Incidentally, your random internet guy is pretty obviously exaggerating. He claims 30 min putting grades into the computer. If he has 40 students in his class, then it takes him 45 seconds to type one number into a spreadsheet! (Entering grades took me 3-4 minutes back when I had students.)
[1] Postdoc, actually. A moot distinction for the purposes of this conversation, but I'm not into self aggrandizement.
I'll echo this: I'm a grad student in English lit and entering my third year. I've taught Engl 101, 102, and 109 (the honor version); the first year I taught, I spent a lot of time in preparation, thinking about activities, and so on. My second year, somewhat less. Ditto for this year.
That isn't to say I'm not changing things from year to year, because I am, but the big hurdle is at the beginning.
Not to be wikipedia-style passive aggressive, I'm just genuinely curious and unfamiliar with these studies.
Not sure why you are multiplying their pay.
Also, I don't know a single teacher who only works their contracted hours each day. My wife works 10 hour days as a teacher, spends unpaid days cleaning her classroom after the school year ends and unpaid days preparing her classroom for the new school year.
Bakery A charges $9 for 9 muffins. Bakery B charges $12 for 12 muffins. Which bakery is more expensive?
Huh, I never thought of that, but you're right. If we just pretend that we pay teachers more than we do, they have great salaries.
