I do not teach math. To me, mathematics belongs in the same mythological realm as unicorns and mountain trolls–interesting to think about, fun in riddles and puzzles, but ultimately unreal. I mean, what is a number really, but a description of something that actually is.
Nonetheless, I recently made the mistake of doing math.
Last night I graded papers for four and a half hours, a regular occurrence for me. Most weeks I push a sixty hour work week, which in the overtime world would be awesome because I’d bank and probably own a yacht and drink martinis or some other silly nonsense. But mind you, I am a teacher–the noble profession.
Somehow I had the terrible idea to calculate how much money I brought home, considering the actual hours I work. Bad idea, teacher.
Bad, bad idea.
Put It in a Word Problem
Let’s say that I take home x dollars each month at a grueling, thankless, yet indispensable job. I am paid for working a laughable forty hours a week. Yet since I work sixty hours each week without overtime pay, what is discrepancy between the paid the dollar amount and the actual earned amount in terms of y in dollars per hour ?
I’m no mathematician, and my formula could probably be better expressed, but since math is mythological, it doesn’t really matter as long as the magical numbers balance in the end:
In any case, it wasn’t the difference in the pay per hour that mattered, but the fact that after working out the calculations, I realized that with as many hours as I work, I am pocketing less per hour than when I waited tables at The Olive Garden as a college student.
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That sounds about right. If you’re being paid for a standard hour week, and you’re working , the discrepancy could be calculated very roughly to be .
is your adjusted hourly rate, is your normal wage, is the number of hours you should work in a week and is your actual number of hours.
So in your case, we could use and to obtain a rough value of .
Hope that makes sense.
If it’s any consolation, my old boss worked about 65 hours a week (but only got paid for 36) – I did a calculation like this and it said he earned an adjusted rate of $9.50 per hour. Which is horrible.
…oh, and sorry. I completely crashed this status with my math.
Actually, I need to correct that last part – it should read .
I get it that teachers work hard, but journalists work just as hard — X hours per week past 40 hours with no extra pay, lesser starting salaries that those for starting teachers, no pension, AND they have to work a full year, not a 180-or 185-day contract. When you calculate the pay based on number of days worked, journalists are making $40 to $50 less a day than a teacher. Just saying …. teachers always complain about how awful their jobs are. Journalists have it a lot worse. :D
Ahhh, but journalists don’t deal with teenagers, parents, AND standardized tests.
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Thanks for the input! I’m actually looking at changing up the theme on my page because this theme has had some major setbacks. Suggestions?
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