It was an unpleasant surprise to discover — on payday, no less — that my salary had slightly decreased from last year. Amid the back-to-school whirlwind and the return of full in-person learning, my paychecks arrived at about $16 under what I had been making on the other side of summer. Admittedly, it’s an amount more annoying than devastating, but no one feels good about making less money, no matter how much.
I did the math: $16 per paycheck is $32 per month is $384 per year. That’s like six fancy dinners with my wife, or two to three weeks of groceries. I could almost feel what I would no longer have.
Then I found out why my pay went down: we dropped a bunch of after-school meetings for the year. That’s an exchange I can get behind, and I’m willing to bet a lot of teachers would be willing to take similarly sized pay cuts to eliminate excess meetings and otherwise trim the fat off their schedules…
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