It’s now been over 6 months since I started a new, better job which pays me $27K more annually, or still substantially less than I’d make in private practice. I finally dissected my paycheck:
I only take home an additional $170 per week; yes, a higher tax bracket means more money is withheld. This is enough to cover the gas for my 84 mile commute. Unfortunately it’s not enough to cover the increased cost of automobile maintenance. So yes, my husband can gloat that I’m driving further for less money.
The payroll deduction for our family medical, dental, and eye plan is identical to the deductiion for my old insurance, and the coverage is nearly identical; some services have higher co-pays, some have lower. The only downside is that because the plan is based out-of-state, it becomes more complicated to reimbursed for some services, depending on whether or not the provider is consider to be in- or out-of network.
So what have I gained? First of all, at my old job the total contribution to my pension was 2% of my pay. However, I had to contribute 3% of my pay to retirees’ medical and pension benefits because the account was underfunded. After 7 1/2 years at my former job, I had accumulated slightly more than a whopping $7K in my pension fund, or roughly enough for 2.5 months of living expenses. At my current job, the deduction for my pension fund is 5.75%. In addition, 8% of my pre-tax income is placed into a deferred compensation plan. In short, 13.75% of my pay is set aside and invested so that in 20 years I may actually be able to retire. Yes, money is tight for the moment, but it is a trade-off. Since my former retirement plan consisted of work-until-I-die, I consider this a vast improvement.
The biggest gain for me has been peace of mind. Despite all the struggles in our family life – the sorrow of facing my son’s mental illness; the failed relationship between my husband and my son; our marriage’s limping along on battery power; the tachyarrhythmia that landed me in the hospital for 3 days in March; the Lyme disease I contracted in May – leaving the old job removed layers upon layers of stress from my life. When I go home at night, my work is done. I no longer need to stay up until 1:00 or 2:00 AM correcting papers, correcting exams, writing lecture notes, writing PowerPoints, writing exams, and checking my endless emails. There are two great fallacies that I have heard expressed about teaching:
- You only have to work six hours a day. Perhaps that meant that I only had to work 6 hours at a time with those 6 hour chunks falling between breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime?
- You get the whole summer off. I’m not sure what “off” means. I do know that every year on the day after Commencement exercises, I refused to do any work at all and gave myself a day off. I do know that the work was less frenetic for most of the summer. However, I also know it was rare for me to not have to spend a day in the office or visiting clinical locations, and my absence only occurred if I was physically incapacitated. I also know that during our “breaks” I would take additional college courses on pedagogy to help me become a better teacher; so while I was instructing 3 credits of coursework, I was concurrently completing 3 credits of graduate-level coursework.
I was damn good at what I did. There are many failures of the higher education system in preparing our young people for gainful employment, but if you came to me and you were willing to work hard and accept responsibility for learning your skills, I could nearly guarantee that you would not only graduate with a piece of paper, but far more importantly, you would pass a national certification examination to actually be able to be employed in your chosen field.
You see, the best part about teaching is teaching. It’s everything that goes along with it that sucks. I had to complete self-studies, self-evaluations, syllabi revisions, curriculum mapping, curriculum reviews, interim reports, accreditation reports, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. For some reason when we accept a job for chump change, we devote an exorbitant amount of effort proving that we deserve our chump change. I tolerated having my judgment, my integrity, and my actions questioned. And finally I said no more.
Academia is too trying for non-super heroes like me. There are extraordinary men and women who are able to dedicate 20 or 30 years of their lives to that effort for ridiculously low pay, but for me, there has to be some kind of reward. I don’t need people to throw me a parade every day or pat me on the back. I don’t need to be rich, and frankly I wouldn’t know what to do with the money if it ever came my way. Yet I need another critic like I need another anus.
I always leave my work at my job now. I can’t guarantee that will be the case when we have an HPAI outbreak, but for now at least, work is work, and home is home. For the time being, that’s enough.