That sound you hear today is the voice of reason, and it’s none other than Mike Smyth over at the Vancouver Province.

In his column today, Smyth explains how expanding teacher preparation time would cost taxpayers millions and millions of dollars. From his piece:

A key reason for the government's resistance is the "multiplier effect" that comes with additional prep time. During a teacher's paid preparation time, that teacher's students become the responsibility of another teacher — sometimes for a music class or library visit — and that fill-in teacher is entitled to prep time, too.

Elementary schoolteachers currently receive an average of 90 minutes of prep time per week, while secondary teachers get a little over three hours. The union is seeking 150 minutes of prep time for elementary teachers and a little over six hours for secondary teachers that would be a combination of prep time and "non-instructional time" away from their own students.

The government is understandably concerned about the costly domino effect of so much additional time when teachers would not be directly teaching their students. All that time would have to be covered off by other teachers, all eligible for additional prep time of their own.

The B.C. Public School Employers Association — which bargains with the union on the government's behalf — also points out that teachers have lots of "non-instructional time" right now.

Consider that the current school year contains 193 "sessional days" when teachers are officially at work. That includes six professional-development days and one "administration day" when classes are cancelled.

That means kids are in class for 186 days a year (not including the three days lost to this week's strike). Each instructional day includes about five hours of actual teaching time, or about 25 hours a week.

For that amount of direct teaching time, teachers receive an average salary of $68,240 — not including benefits. That works out to $366.88 for each day of direct classroom teaching.

Now, before all the teachers out there start sending me hate mail: I'm not suggesting for a second that teachers don't do a tonne of work outside of class hours. Teachers must prepare lessons, mark papers, meet with students and their parents and attend staff meetings, among many other duties. Many teachers generously donate their time to extracurricular activities.

I am suggesting, however, that 193 "sessional days" a year looks pretty luxurious to an average working stiff getting by on four weeks' vacation each year.

I am suggesting that many of the union's contract demands are over the top and unaffordable, including the demand for more preparation time.

I must be a sucker—I only get three weeks’ vacation. One more pivotal fact from Smyth:

Consider that, over the past 10 years, the number of students enrolled in the B.C. public-school system has dropped by 59,000. Yet the budget for education has gone up by more than a billion dollars, a 29-per-cent increase. That can't go on forever.

You don’t need a Statistics 12 class to figure that one out.