This is a very good way to look at this situation. Also the lady birdie nest on here needs to realize lawyers and so on make more money because they have longer hours, harder jobs, more research, and just in general harder jobs. They have to stay up todate on the law and so on. You know a lawyers job is harder. Look at it this way, teachers make more than police officer's. Are there jobs meaning less. teachers have great hours, holiday pay, 2 weeks off at christmas, a week or so off at spring break, paid summer vacation, insurance, 4o1k, oh yea, don't forget the sick and personal days off with pay. Sounds pretty good to me!!!! I will take the $30,000 to $40,000 (and some make more) pay that SC pays a teacher along with all that time off!!!!!! I don' think lawyers get that!

Wow! I have been teaching for 16 years and have never thought that 7:30 am to 4:30 pm was any less hours than any other full-time worker. (Oops, I forgot about all the correcting and planning I do at home!)

We do not have paid holidays or paid summer vacation. School districts take our pay for the ten months we are in school and split it equally among all twelve months, so that we have a paycheck over the summer. Oh, and most of my family's health insurance is deducted from my salary.

People have this old- fashioned view of the teaching profession. Wake up and do some research, oh lawyer, we are now in the twenty-first century.

Low and behold, I was found supposedly "below grade level" in many math concepts, and the recommendation was 36 hours of tutoring at a price near $5k. My mom was instantly captured by Sylvan's brainwashing.

I went in to tutoring for the first day, and was unimpressed. First, there is three kids per teacher, not the "One on one" tutoring they claim to have. Second, the majority of the time, I was given a math workbook and told to do problems. While they did explain how to do the problems, very little time was spent actually being taught. The majority of the time was spent trying to get the ADD and autistic kids to do their work, and dealing with the errant misbehavior of the tykes running wild around the center.

So let's talk about the work. It was virtually the same math problems every time, so all you had to do was memorize the answers to appear like you were "learning" the concept. One time I literally drew in my notebook for the entire math hour with no teacher involvement. Another time I said I was bored, so the teacher gave me blocks to play with...Yes, my parents were paying $45 an hour to let me play with blocks and draw.

To me, Sylvan seems like a glorified babysitting service for wealthy private school students who couldn't give a toss about their schoolwork. Even Parenting magazine says that Sylvan is "Good for kids who aren't super motivated" It disgusts me that people are paying a service to make their children do work. What happened to old fashioned parenting? The liberals call it "Child abuse" now.

Back to the math course. After being taught how to take [and pass] the Sylvan test, it appeared that I was "on grade level" according to the center.That was until the next day, when my math homework was due, and I got a 68%.

I'm a freshman in high school now and am doing just fine. Oh, and the elementary 5678+6376 math we were doing is now on calculators. Blimey!

If the call center Rep doesn't do this Call Flow and have "control" of the call, they can lose their job. Its quite a lt of pressure. And they have to unload a terrible price onto the parent like that. Some parents are quite emotional about their child struggling, some even crying, and there's nothing the Sylvan Representative can do because they are being listened to on virtually ever call. All they can say is "I understand, Sylvan can help." You just have to go into debt to pay for Sylvan's help. It's terrible. The government should step in a lot more with funding for these children to get one on one attention from a certified teacher like they do at Sylvan. It's a good service, just way to expensive for the average american to be able to afford.

As a teacher I do not believe you have a clue what it is really like. I separated from the military after 10 years to pursue what I feel to be a "calling" and have been doing so for the past 13 years. So I gave up a guaranteed retirement from the military, great pay, and I could have collected that retirement 4 years ago at the age of 40 and now have to put in 30 years of teaching to get paid less than what I could have gotten so your statement doesn't add up. Also, do you have a child? Why don't you calculate how much it costs to send the child to day care because some of our teachers unfortunately are having to babysit and or raise a child because the parents at home don't seem to be doing the job very well (more than the classroom coursework). If we only had to teach maybe your point is relevant, but with today's society it goes well beyond that in our classrooms. Ah Duh...

Boo freaking hoo. You CHOSE to leave the military. You CHOSE to be a teacher. There are other jobs out there that you could have taken. Don't gripe about the money you don't make when you chose to do what you do. You are paid very well for only working eight months out of the year. $5k a month is a very fine living no matter what part of the country you are from. I have two children and they are both in school, and I know exactly how much it costs to send them to daycare. Schools are not day cares. I agree that some parent are lacking, but you are still paid very well for your profession, have good benefits, and a very good retirement. If you don't feel like $5k a month is good enough, then get a summer job. Very and I mean very few teachers are paid less than $40k a year. There are a lot of poor teachers out there that are protected by teacher's unions that should not be teaching anybody. There are teachers out there that are tenured that would not make good crossing guards, much less teachers, but the ISD's can not get rid of them. I believe teachers would have a gripe about pay if test scores weren't so low and if the US was not ranked so low internationally in math and reading. Teacher pay is not based on merit either; that is a problem. Don't cry me a river because you aren't making what you think you should be making. You are making more that I am while working twenty five percent less of the year, and making almost the same as my RN wife who also works the full year.