When I said $35,000, I meant as a starting salary. But a mid-career salary of $50,000 would be enough to support a family if you were receiving the benefits that teachers expected to receive in the past. Good health insurance, good dental and a pension when you retire can make up for a deflated salary.

Honestly, $35,000 - $60,000 is an acceptable salary in a lot of places. Its specifically places like the Bay Area where it’s just not ok to call that a “professional” salary. I would be fine teaching, where I live, for that amount of money provided that the day to day conditions where I worked were good. You could…

And, honestly, because they can get away with it because their teachers stay out of loyalty to the community. The Catholic and Baptist school teachers that I’ve known are the ones who most often retire with nothing. Some of them were credentialed. They would have had a nice retirement if they’d just gone into public…

Came here to say the same thing. And even if they do pay almost the same in salary. The benefits are usually crap. Lots of career private school teachers retire to poverty.

I’m not writing this to say you owe your sister understanding or anything else. But, I will say, as someone who has been where your sister is, that thought: “But this keeps me thin” is informed by something other than vanity. When you have anorexia and you’re hungry/low-weight, that doesn’t feel like it does for…

I so feel this post except that I really don’t think that addiction treatment, in the US, has improved. At all. The science of addiction treatment has advanced on a global level. But in the US we still have courts mandating that people attend AA, a religious affiliated organization whose program contradicts the…

I’ve thought a lot about the curability of anorexia. It goes back three generations in my family (on my father’s side). 3/5 of the women in my generation were diagnosed. And 1 of them is your sister’s age and has never been cured. I really believe that we need to acknowledge what science tells us: This is a…