I think you sound like a great teacher and I would like you.@Mad Mike I agree and I'll be the first to say that we are very well paid...as for 13 weeks of paid time off, we don't get paid for the summer...we get paid during the summer, but it's actually a 10 month contract that is spread out over 12...used to be before I started in 2005, that they received a lump sum payment the end of June and most teachers ran out during the summer months, so contracts were changed to have our 10 month salary spread out over 26 equal payments..
now having said that, I've worked in corporate before (7 years in transportation/logistics and 7 years in banking/finance) and I can tell you I knew A LOT of people in higher up positions that made a heck of a lot more than teachers do and worked WAY less than teachers do...
I agree with @SVeezy and @GreyGhost that there are probably more caring teachers out there than there are that don't care (I can probably count on half of one hand the number of lazy ones in my school and we have about 60 teachers on staff)...unfortunately, it's the ones that don't care that make the headlines and or stay in the forefront of people's minds when they think of teachers that do ruin it for the rest of us...
The whole we get paid for 10 months a year is a bad argument. If you want to run with your job is a 10 month a year job, you need to annualize your compensation (multiply by 12/10) to get an equivalent salary for a full time job. You either need to look at annualized comp or include the summer as vacation, you can't have it both ways when comparing to every other employment opportunity.