Articles like this never come as a surprise to a Gatto fan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
https://archive.org/details/WeaponsOfMassInstruction
https://archive.org/details/DumbingUsDown-TheHiddenAgendaOfC...
Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
221–230 of 420 posts
Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
I won’t make any predictions about the future of software engineering opportunities, but your line of reasoning will never have any inherent connection to job opportunities. As the cliche goes, life’s not fair, and working harder preparing yourself for your career has never meant that you will make more money than someone who didn’t work as hard.
Absolutely, there's no full correlation between how hard you work and how successful you are, there are situations where the contrast is totally out of wack. We're (unfortunately) used to execs taking home insane pays for dubious reasons, but right now we're seeing something similar with every day people.
The supply of people who can reliably turn time at a keyboard into code that solves problems people are willing to pay to have solved is wildly outstripped by demand. You're just continuing to see that in a world where most other industries don't have a supply problem.
Also, as rationale people will be happy to tell you, buying my employees lunch is a screaming deal.
An employee going to lunch takes at least an hour: walk to takeout, wait in line (everyone gets hungry at the same time), walk back and eat. I can recover at least 30 minutes by paying to have lunch delivered every day. Plus, for better or for worse, it costs me roughly $16 pp per day but it would cost me probably $25 to pay an employee $16. I didn't write the tax rules, but I can optimize within them.
Note there is also not a single person in my company who makes less than $32 (16*2) per hour. So I'm very happy to pay $16 to recover, on average, 30 minutes of their time.
Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait - so teachers in Massachusetts are not protected from lawsuits by their union or the schools? That's messed up
Serious question.. if the union isn't defending the teachers from bs lawsuits for legitimately doing their jobs, what is it doing?
Negotiating pay and defending teachers from the administration
Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
in a similar vein, my aunt who is going for a few more years than your mom noted that the ratio of non teaching jobs to teaching narrowed considerably and she ended moving from a city system to a county system because of all the appointees from the mayor's office which ate up funds they could use for other needs. throw in that many of the non teaching jobs are being held in higher regard and also quick to deflect the…
It is a very curious thing that administrators in school districts are held in higher regard than the teachers. Programmers are held in higher regard because they do the actual work, if you know what I mean. Everyone else is in a support role. And yet in school administrators are paid higher and have it easier, because they don't have to deal with parents directly.
Administrators do have to deal with parents, and with the press, and with the police, etc. I'm not saying their job is more important than teaching, but they will be the ones facing the public when anything bad or embarrassing happens at the school.
Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s more work, and that’s exactly the problem. A teacher deserves to go home and enjoy their family and life outside of work. The only way to make this possible is to have students and parents understand that after a certain point the grade is simply final, so if you want a good grade it’s your responsibility to learn the material prior to exams or large projects or assignments being due. Everyone knows this; there…
I don't think "everyone knows this", not to the degree you indicate. Yes there is a balance to be made, but I and many of my colleagues believe the opportunity for learning shouldn't stop once an assignment has been graded. We believe that such grades are in fact the diagnostic we should use to determine which students need to be helped along, given the opportunity to learn the material better. You also say that a st…
Using intermediate grades to figure out which students to focus on is perfectly fine, and in fact I'm not sure it has much to do with what's being discussed. We're talking about a teacher being asked by a parent to create extra credit work so a student can jump from an A- to an A so they have better odds of getting into X/Y/Z.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that teachers can't dynamically adjust their attention across students as the class progresses based on grades. But at the same time teachers should not just be the pawns of parents. A parent shouldn't be able to just demand extra credit work for their child. This sort of special exception is something that should only be made by the teacher, at the teacher's complete discretion, if they legitimately think there's a truly good reason for treating that student differently.
Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#226There'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…
"What extra credit can she do to make this an A?" "She can't, because that's the grade she earned in the time alloted. The moving finger, having writ, has moved on. "However, I'm confident that, with Janie's capabilities, a little more effort from her and help from you, she can easily demonstrate a higher level of mastery and the consequent benefits from longer-term retention. "Princeton will NOT be a picnic, and dev…
It doesn’t stop at high school. No rich parent is paying $50k a year so their kid can get a C.
Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#227https://outline.com/ZuA8TG
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Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#228Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#229https://outline.com/ZuA8TG
Copyright infringement.
Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#230I'm going to state a couple of strong opinions and hope it doesn't backfire on me:
1) Teachers should be paid more.
2) Teachers shouldn't be pressured to work so many hours off the clock (after school).
3) Teachers may continue to make their own lesson plans, but they should always have available lesson plans available to them.
4) School administrations should protect teachers from harassing parents.
5) The number of administrative employees & administrations in general should be reduced or consolidated. You have some school districts with over 100 schools, and others shepherding just a few. The differences between districts can be very big (especially when it comes to lesson plans).
6) Politics is f-cking us hard here. Education should be easy to fund and a non-issue. The current situation is under-serving our children, and will create a feedback loop of underfunded/undervalued education. I personally believe a lot of allocated funds are spent wastefully on the administration and not teachers.
7) I wish we had online examinations that students could take over and over from day #1 of the school year to improve on over the year. There could be material that requires teachers be present to administer, and others that students can do on their own at home (and possibly cheat on). It would have helped me immensely to be familiar with what we were going to learn about "next month". I first encountered a syllabus with a month-to-month plan in community college.
8) Can't forget this: F-ck zero tolerance policies. Schools need a lawyer on-site looking out for the rights of students.
9) You shouldn't need a masters degree to teach 5th grade algebra. It should be easy to hire someone off the street who can pass a background check and exams against the course they might teach.
10) And then easier ways to account for students so it doesn't take 15 minutes to 'start class'. Longer days that start later (8am) & less/no homework.