The New York Times published an editorial lamenting the fact that some teachers work summers:

It is a time when school lets out, and hundreds of thousands of teachers start their second jobs to keep their rents and mortgages paid. One day they're shaping minds, a moral force in the lives of the young people they teach and know, and in some ways the architects of the future of the nation. The next day they're serving cocktails and selling plasma TV's at the mall.

And this is a problem? Why should the taxpayers pay them to sit around the pool all summer? My father was a teacher, and he spent his summers at the pool - as a lifeguard. He loved it, and that job bought a lot of luxuries for our family. But to the pinheads at the Times, it is considered somehow demeaning.

Not counting those who teach summer school, about 20 percent of the country's teachers have second jobs (often during the school year, too), and the majority of those jobs could not be construed as enhancing universal respect for those who teach.

The authors go on to blame teacher pay for the "problem" of teachers working second jobs. They lament that the average teacher salary in 2003 was $45,771, not including a stipend for a master's degree. Across all professions, master's prepared professionals average $62,820.

Well let's run some numbers. $45,771 over nine months represents $5085 per month. So these bachelor's prepared teachers are really making the equivalent of $61,000 a year for the months they work, about equivalent to a master's degree in the private sector. Why shouldn't they contribute to the economy in some way during June, July, and August?