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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

#241

Post by vkou »

mcv wrote: post #80
duncan-donuts wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never been in a union, but I’m sure not all unions are created equal. I wonder if unions get in a position where there’s no non-union competition they start to operate in the best interests of the union and not the interests of the people they represent. /shrug I’d love to hear more from the OP about this, fwiw.

If the best interest of the union is not the same as the best interest of the union members (teachers in this case, presumably), there's something seriously wrong.

For the most part, the interests of the teacher's union, and the interests of its constituents are aligned. There's a few edge cases where they aren't.

The same can be said for any form of democracy, though.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#242

Post by kojeovo »

zanny wrote: post #169
xamuel wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people wouldn't be able to cut it in software dev, whether they did the 3 month bootcamp or even if they managed to pass a 4-year university program. 99% of the time, Little Jimmy's 4th grade English teacher would have a snowball's chance in hell as a professional developer.

This might have been true 20 years ago when software development meant everything from a fundamental understanding of hardware (including how pixels are laid out, how to manage gamma, etc for the front end) to knowing a lot of theory (because you had to implement your collections in house, manage the code base by hand, etc) but nowadays I'm pretty sure at least half of everyone could be pointed at a web framework and…

It's easy to make a website look pretty - which is what I find bootcamp people can be good at.

That's a very small part of software development.

They've, in my experience, struggled with highly distributed and scalable applications/systems.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#243

Post by ams6110 »

x0x0 wrote: post #222
shados wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

Why not make them work through lunch and provide overhead delivery of liquid nutritional supplements and coffee through a rubber tube? And you could have their desk chair plumbed to the sewer line so they would not need to take bathroom breaks. You might recover another 60 minutes of time during the day.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#244

Post by mista_duval »

I can personally relate to this story. My wife has been working in education for the past 6 years. She frequently complains about the rediculous workload, byzantine regulations and red tape and the rediculosly low pay she gets to deal with it all. But she’s not alone. I frequently hang out with her and her co-workers and they all seem to be feeling the same way. Many are wondering if all their efforts are making a diffrence at all. Some of them have left and found jobs in the corporate world where they can work a steady 9 to 5 while receiving better benifits and compensation. Many of them found jobs in corporate training where they can put their education expertise to good use. I’m not sure what it’s going to take but something has to be done to stop this trend. The education brain drain is going to have serious reprocusions in a few short years. What’s going to happen when there just isn’t anyone willing to take on the workload? Sure, raising pay would help but that just seems to be the tip of the iceberg. Educator need more resources to do the job right and it seems they’re just not getting them right now.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#245

Post by kojeovo »

krapp wrote: post #125
pault wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I spend 40 hours a week making paper hats? Should I be entitled to a living wage?

Yes. If you choose to dedicate the bulk of your waking life to creating wealth for your employer, you should be compensated, at a minimum, well enough to feed, clothe and house yourself. or there should be something like UBI in place to allow employers to decouple the cost of keeping their employees alive from the cost of doing business.

How does that change if 100m people want to live in a city that realistically houses 10m?

A bit of an unrealistic scenario, but my city has a very low vacancy rate, and you can't live there on minimum wage / just above. There are just too many people making more money.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#246

Post by erikpukinskis »

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…

I’d just pick a charity, tell them they can make a donation. Each $1000 they donate gets them a third of a level. A- to A just costs a grand.

There’s no corruption on my part because I don’t keep the money.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#247

Post by pjleonhardt »

kojeovo wrote: post #240
atombender wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a great life-work balance, but it also sounds like a privileged position that is unrealistic for many teachers. My girlfriend teaches art to kids aged 8-14 at an urban public school, and she has zero time during the day for lesson planning, grading, seating plans, hanging up artwork, dealing with parents, etc. On most days she has to stay behind for several hours, and she often works throughout the w…

What does the her schedule look like exactly? She's in the classroom teaching for 8 hours straight (minus lunch)? This reads a lot like people who make excuses for not having time to exercise. I get that some positions will require you to put in work outside of work hours, but to say 'has zero time' seems like a bit of an excuse.

Not the OP, but my wife is a teacher and has one 50 minute prep during her day. She teaches 7 different classes. Most days the school can't find enough substitute teachers and she ends up having to sub for another class during her one prep hour.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#249

Post by sethammons »

kbenson wrote: post #179
sethammons wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unde…

The software we used to have (Aries Portal) did not have a "ready to publish" state on entered assignments (at least, not back then). As soon as the assignment was entered, it was immediately affecting grades. I did not have high hopes for usability testing or anything really. You could, at the time, access student info that, as a teacher, you should not have access to (discipline records, for example) with basic url tampering.
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