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Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

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Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#171

Post by MisterTea »

ineedasername wrote: post #35
allcentury wrote: post #14

There's much more to this story. My mother, a high school calculus teacher for the last 22 years is so ready to retire. I didn't think my mom would ever retire, she spends countless hours coming up with unique lesson plans for the kids - they usually involve games, real world use cases and many ah-ha moments. She lives for those moments when a kid lights up when they understand the value of what their learning. Now t…

Okay, I get that's more work, and sounds like a hassle. So this isn't a criticism of your mom. But on the A- and extra credit issue, I never understood the point of rigid grading schemes. I've taught at a college level, and I always give students the chance to improve their grades if they want to put in additional work. To do otherwise seems like saying "nope, even if you learn more and improve to the point of A-leve…

I agree with the stance that the +/- nomenclature should be taken outback and shot. It's that bad.

A+ Student has demonstrated that they have exceeded a firm grasp of the subject. (How do you measure to 11 on a scale of 1-10?)

A Student has demonstrated that they have a firm grasp of the subject. (makes sense, this means they know their stuff.)

A- Student kinda has a firm grasp of the subject. (WTF?)

Now apply that silliness to B, C, and D. A,B,C,D,F is enough. Excellent understanding, Good understanding, General understanding, Poor understanding, Does not understand.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#172

Post by wallflower »

labster wrote: post #134
wallflower wrote: post #12

It is not mentioned in this particular article and my teacher friends say that dealing with parents is a constant pain. Of course, not all parents are a pain. Only a few. Teachers are not in the profession to listen to why little high school age Johnny did not get an A on his paper, not the least because you, the parent, helped him write that paper.

Teachers should stop assigning tasks that necessitate parent participation, then. I was assigned to write a novella in sixth grade, for crying out loud. I like creative writing now, but I didn't back then, and the assignment sure didn't help.

It wasn't clear in the original comment but the paper that the high school student did was not supposed to be written by the parent or receive assistance from the parent in any form. The student was in high school!

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#173

Post by grecy »

skywhopper wrote: post #93
jpatokal wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-American here: what happens if the teacher just flatly says no/doesn't answer the emails/calls etc? Are lawsuits against teachers over grades an actual thing in the US now? (In Europe or Australia you'd be laughed out of court for even trying.)

No such lawsuits are not a thing. I’m sure people threaten it. But it doesn’t happen. That said, the teachers do have a responsibility to respond to parents. But they should never give in to helicopter parent special requests for extra credit.

> That said, the teachers do have a responsibility to respond to parents

Are you sure about that?

In my opinion the teachers have a responsibility to do the best damn job they can teaching their students. Meetings, parent emails and "admin paperwork", etc. are all a distant second.

I know my brother pushes back against it, and just says there are not enough hours in the day to respond to the requests of the hundreds of parents of all of his students.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#174

Post by spamizbad »

ineedasername wrote: post #35
allcentury wrote: post #14

There's much more to this story. My mother, a high school calculus teacher for the last 22 years is so ready to retire. I didn't think my mom would ever retire, she spends countless hours coming up with unique lesson plans for the kids - they usually involve games, real world use cases and many ah-ha moments. She lives for those moments when a kid lights up when they understand the value of what their learning. Now t…

Okay, I get that's more work, and sounds like a hassle. So this isn't a criticism of your mom. But on the A- and extra credit issue, I never understood the point of rigid grading schemes. I've taught at a college level, and I always give students the chance to improve their grades if they want to put in additional work. To do otherwise seems like saying "nope, even if you learn more and improve to the point of A-leve…

> I never understood the point of rigid grading schemes

My wife is a college psychology professor and is fairly strict with her grading scheme. She makes this clear on the first day of class and spells it out directly, in bold, on the syllabus.

Her rationale is this: The likelihood of you asking for extra credit, or excuses, or various "grade grubbing" activities is largely influenced by your socioeconomic background. Students who make special grading requests overwhelmingly skew white and female and are more likely to take place at institutions that take students from more affluent backgrounds. She doesn't want her grading inadvertently biased against males, non-whites, or less affluent students so her grades are final. Despite this inflexibility, her student evaluations are sky-high.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#176

Post by grecy »

e1g wrote: post #77
grecy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My entire family are teachers (Mum, Dad, Sister, Brother), and have all had to deal with this to varying degrees, and have had it consume their lives at various times. My brother has the best work-life balance of any teacher I have ever met, and I think his approach is brilliant. Teaching is one of those careers where the expectation is on the teacher to endlessly do more and work harder, "For the kids", and if you k…

Presumably the backpresure of requests does not go away - when parents email for information, they do not stop just because they didn’t get a response. They will reach out through other methods. Do you know how that irreducible workload gets resolved, other than getting passed to colleagues who do put in extra effort/hours?

> Presumably the backpresure of requests does not go away

It does. If the matter is actually important/urgent he will call a parent to speak to them directly, or the matter can be discussed at the next parent/teacher interview.

The unimportant ones go away.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#177

Post by zanny »

shados wrote: post #76
throwaway98121 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we should treat teachers better and pay them more. I agree we should value other professions too. That being said, I’m not following how attitudes in software engineering are related to the topic of this post. The freebies, on call outrage, etc is inherent to the tech industry with venture capitalist money or otherwise insane net profits... the longer term sustainability is questionable, but fresh college gra…

> That being said, I’m not following how attitudes in software engineering are related to the topic of this post. Sorry, I probably made my point poorly. It wasn't about attitude in software engineering. It was how insanely overvalued the field is, with a completely out of wack investment to reward ratio. Few to no other fields come even close, and its siphoning people from all other fields as well as creating unreas…

The worst part is that on average developers are still often underpaid. In some cases grotesquely. Some individual engineers can easily account for millions in revenue in a year to the company they work for, but they are only paid upwards of a few hundred thousand. On the flipside there are certainly a lot of people employed in industry making their companies negative revenue - costing developer hours to make up for their mistakes or ineptitude worth less than the working code they produce.

Software is eating the world in almost all regards. Being able to perform that act - the eating part - makes you way more valuable than the effort required. But so long as characters can translate into dollars for someone the one making the characters will remain very valuable.

Don't for a second be "ashamed" if someone is offering to pay you large sums of money for what you think isn't worth it - the ugly fact of reality is that we don't get to set the value of our time, those with the money to buy it do. Society is offering little money to teachers and that sucks, but that has nothing to do with code being so valuable as to justify abnormal incomes relative to the average of the rest of the working class.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#178

Post by ineedasername »

jogjayr wrote: post #164
woolvalley wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's a pay issue too isn't it? If a family paid for the teachers time for extra work, then I'm guessing the pushback wouldn't be as bad.

It's not a big leap from "pay extra for extra credit assignments to improve grade" to "pay extra to improve grade". I'm not suggesting that the vast majority of teachers would be tempted or give in to bribery. But it sets up perverse incentives and the optics are terrible. It's also unfair to students who didn't do well and whose families can't afford to pay the teacher to grade their extra credit assignments.

I've hearrd of teachers in the local school district that offer for-pay tutoring to their students... It's always struck me as something of a conflict of interest, but I'm really not sure how I feel about it.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#179

Post by kbenson »

sethammons wrote: post #66
kbenson wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Especially now that she has to post everyone's grades online, instantly emails roll in when a student didn't perform as well as the parent expected. Not to take away from your point, which I think has merit, from the other side of the spectrum as a parent that has a child that struggled mightily to not fail for the first couple years of high school, the amount that teachers screw up the online grading is incredible…

When I was teaching, grading took so incredibly long that there would be periods of time (read: nearly always) where I was simply behind entering scores. I typically did 10 to 12 hour days plus a good 6hr day most Saturdays, and usually a few hours Sunday. I only caught up on student vacations.

To be clear, the problem is not just being behind entering scores, it's entering base assignment info into the grading system and then being behind entering scores. I'm not sure what prevents teachers from creating the assignment in the system once they have scores to enter, so the time during which it would be erroneously affecting a grade is minimized, but a lot of teachers to not seem to do this.

What I don't understand is why, given that they must see the problems this creates as they eventually roll downhill to the teachers.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#180

Post by jogjayr »

bjourne wrote: post #101
allcentury wrote: post #14

There's much more to this story. My mother, a high school calculus teacher for the last 22 years is so ready to retire. I didn't think my mom would ever retire, she spends countless hours coming up with unique lesson plans for the kids - they usually involve games, real world use cases and many ah-ha moments. She lives for those moments when a kid lights up when they understand the value of what their learning. Now t…

That complaint doesn't make any sense. I can understand teachers complaining about kids disturbing their lessons, are unruly and threaten them with violence and so on. I can not understand teachers complaining about kids being extra ambitious and doing what they can to get the highest grades! I'll get downvoted for this, but if your moms worst problem is overachievers and parents caring about their children's educati…

Asking the teacher to set and grade extra credit work because a student didn't get the grade they wanted isn't fair to the teacher. I don't think the teacher is the one that needs to "suck it up" here ;-). The student could just try not going to Princeton - most of the world hasn't studied there and done fine.
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