<p>There’s probably no way to find agreement here, but I’ll try to add a little nuance anyway. If you look at a yearly calendar, yes, teachers work fewer days overall. But many (not all) work 12+ hour days during that 180 day calendar, and it is a calendar they haven’t chosen – unless they only went into teaching to have the summers off. I have done many jobs in my lifetime and none has been more exhausting than K-12 teaching. The intense human interaction can’t be sufficiently quantified. Consider, for example, that the average teacher makes 7000 decisions a day (about bathroom breaks, pencil sharpening, etc.). And now, consider young people who go into teaching to make a difference and find, at the end of the day, that they just couldn’t be the kind, thoughtful, deliberate adult that they wanted to be with each of the 40+ kids in each of their classes. I have been enormously frustrated with my kids’ PS teachers, but I don’t blame them. Could you do it??</p>