Our teachers here at Karns have a great deal of responsibilities to keep up with; they have classes to run, students to keep in check, emails to answer, and much more. It’s a great deal of stress that comes with being a high school teacher, and yet students don’t realize that on top of the stress of teaching, so many of our teachers are working second jobs.

It can be hard to make a living in almost any career out there considering the world we live in today. A teacher’s salary can have a huge range and varies from person to person. For many of our teachers, having a backup job to fall back on proves for them a smart decision to make, whatever their reasoning to do so may be.

After being asked about this subject, here’s some of our teachers that you may not have known work multiple jobs and what they have to say!

Cynthia Campen, who shares that she works part time at Sun Tan City, various UT events, and has just begun working the NAP program here at Karns this year.

“Everything is very carefully planned and on my calendar,” said Campen.

B.J Arvin, who has been teaching online AP classes, is an AP reader during the summer, and delivers food for doordash, grubhub, and uber eats.

Since Covid-19, Arvin shares “I stopped coaching at that time so I was used to getting paid for coaching…I needed to supplement the money somehow…..some of it, like delivering food, has just become a habit, a way to kill time.”

When asked about the extra load of stress this might bring, Arvin says “Well anything we do extra, it cuts into your free time away from the main job here.”

Mr. Robinson, who reveals that he is teaching night school and homebound, uses Airbnb and Vrbo, rents out houseboats and yachts, and on top of all this has his own business, “Robinson Dirtworks”.

Robinson shares that these additional jobs provide more money as, presumably, an alone career as a teacher gets tight.

Robinson does also share how through all this work he’s doing, “The most stressful thing I do all day is working here…I have a four year old so it’s not weird that he’s sitting on my lap while I mow three yards.”

Here is a quick look into only three of the many teachers of Karns that have much more going on in their personal lives than us as students realize. Many of them are working harder than we know.

Working various jobs as a teacher definitely isn’t as unheard of as we may think, so next time you’re on your way to class, be sure not to give your teacher too much trouble!