I would like to rant on my wife's behalf.
So, she's an English teacher. Now, the way teaching gigs work in Taiwan (not sure if it's the same elsewhere) is that first you need to take a teaching training course, and pass its final evaluation. Stuff like teaching theory, six month internship at a school, etc. Only then are you considered an eligible, certified teacher.
After receiving certification, you then go to city- or county-wide teacher recruitment exams, where you need to take a written exam, and then if you pass the written exam (something like a 10% pass rate), you then do a ten-minute sample teaching in front of a panel of judges, who then only select the best and most impressive teachers (again, something like a 10% pass rate, so the overall selection rate is close to 1%).
As you can see, the teacher recruitment process is very competitive, and lots of people try for years and years until they get a teaching job. My wife, being the academic genius that she is, got in on the first try (seriously, so proud of her).
Now, here's the ranty part. There were around 35 openings for English teachers this year in the Taipei region. My wife came around 20th overall in the final rankings. The new teachers get to select their teaching gigs based on their ranking, so the teacher who performed the best gets to pick the cushiest school, one that's close to civilization and has the best reputation, etc. By the time they got to 20th, only the relatively undesirable schools were left. My wife had to pick a tiny elementary school (120 students in total, including first to sixth grade) on the other side of Taipei. So now she needs to get up at 5am every morning, and endure a 90 minute commute, just to get to work.
But that's not all. Because the school is tiny, they're intensely short-staffed. This means teachers need to take on additional responsibilities. And it's more than just having the chemistry teacher act as the baseball coach. My wife, who was trained in English language education, has been roped into the school's general affairs division, and is in charge of the school's finances. And because the school's so small, their payroll only has room for one English teacher, which means my wife needs to teach all six grades. That's 12 hours a week, just in the classroom, and not including the work that needs to be done for six different curricula.
Let me just repeat that. A first-time teacher who's trained in English education has been given the job of overseeing an entire elementary school's finances. She has no financial management experience or training. This is in addition to her already exceedingly heavy workload of handling the English language education of every student in the school. She needs to get up at 5am every day to do this job.
She loves teaching. She's taught at cram schools before, and she found it to be a rewarding experience. She wanted to get a teaching gig at a proper elementary school though, because it offers better job security. She needs to stay at this school for at least two years before she can apply for a transfer (part of the teaching recruitment regulations). I can just imagine these two years completely burning out any enthusiasm for teaching she'll ever have. Yesterday was the first day of school. School's meant to be out at 4pm, but she had to stay until 7 to deal with the financial stuff, and she only got home at 8:30. She basically came back home a zombie, mentally and physically exhausted. This is going to be every day for her from now on.
It sucks that I can't help her. It sucks that I'm not a more competent earner. If I made mad amounts of cash, she wouldn't have to work. I wish I could do more.