The recent teachers' strike struck me as absurd.

I was a teacher all my working life and never considered I was paid too little.

I'm interested in ideas, especially Mathematical ideas and I like reading, so to some extent I was being paid for pursuing my hobbies. As teaching involves conveying ideas to the young, people who don't find ideas interesting are likely to find the job tedious, and their sense of tedium is likely to be communicated to their pupils. Such people would be better not teaching at all. I think the union activists and trouble makes are usually misfits of that sort. I encountered a number of them when I was teaching. They seemed to combine a cantankerous ill humour with a blinkered economic innumeracy, expecting that any money they thought they needed could be made to appear just by appealing to wordy political slogans.