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Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

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281–290 of 420 posts

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the area I taught, median pay was about $60k/yr. After 20 years and getting more advanced degrees, you could get to $80k/yr. Most of the teachers I worked with worked more hours per year than just about any software engineer I know. Only very lazy or very tenured teachers were getting the fabled summer vacation or winter break. I have more income, more vacation, and better hours as a developer than I ever did as a…

https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/EDFP_a_0013... > Using data from the American Time Use Survey, I find that teachers work an average of 34.5 hours per week on an annual basis (38.0 hours per week during the school year and 21.5 hours per week during the summer months).

Anecdotally, I routinely work 50-60 hours a week as a high school level English teacher a suburb of a major metropolitan city. That’s excluding my 20 minute lunch period.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#282
post #253

I'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…

I'm going to state a very strong opinion here and know that it will backfire: families should be educating their kids themselves, and society should make this financially possible (let's start off with eliminating the dual-income family). Teachers, as they are currently qualified, should be adjuncts to the family school.

That's what we've done with literacy in the US for the past few decades and literacy rates have decreased. An abject failure.

What a terrible idea for society -- religious zealots only teaching their children one religious book (whichever one they like), people afraid of math teaching their children to be afraid of math, thespians only teaching theater, violinists whose children never get to try cello.... parents who don't speak English doing what exactly in English?

It works fine if you're a shoemaker teaching your kid to make shoes. But I've seen what my kid learns from her teachers and peers. It is really fun and stuff I'd never come up with.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#283
post #11

Articles like these, while only loosely related, always make me think that the software engineering bubble has to pop. You have people with ton of education busting their behind dealing with little brats all day to try to make sure they have a future... During that time, some bro who read a couple of books and hammered on his keyboard, and MAYBE did a 3 months bootcamp gets bummed if he can't pull in 100k in one of t…

Dude, people die in ditches far from their home for a tenth of what I make in a year living in comfort. Society values people based on perceived economic impact not perceived job difficulty. And that’s probably a good idea.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#284

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.

My parents did my schoolwork for me so I could go out and play in nature. I think I’ll do the same for my kids. I think I turned out okay and considering they were surgeons working more then than I do now I should be able to pull it off.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the real deal world, sure you do: ever not get something right the first try at work? Ever have to work longer hours because a project ran over the expected time? The real world doesn't have all of the arbitrary limits we see in the modern education system.

In the real world there are lots of drop-dead deadlines with no possibility of extension, usually imposed by external constraints.

In the real world you usually have the option of scaling back the scope of what you deliver to meet a deadline. If school were more representative of typical workplace conditions, you'd have the option of taking the first half of the midterm half-way through the semester and then taking the other half at the end, and then you could scale back the credits you get for the course from 3 to 1.5. Then you could do the second half of the course the next semester.

There were at least 3 classes I recall from university where I really didn't learn anything of substance past the midterm. I managed to pull a B+ or an A- by turning in every single assignment on time, doing a decent job on the project, and applying test-taking tactics on the final. For at least one of those classes I wish I could slow the pace and spread it out into the next semester. But the way it was structured at my university, it as "all-or-nothing" on the curriculum within an artificial period of time.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#286
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…

I've found that's how I have to do it, too. Best decision I ever made was moving an hour away from where I worked too. I never see kids out anywhere, and never feel pressure to not do things I enjoy that might be looked down on in a rural conservative community (drinking, mostly). I also never really have to deal with seeing students out so no awkward convos there, either. And it gives me time to wake up in the morni…

That’s, assuming you work 48 weeks a year, 20 full days spent in transportation though...

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most people don't need to make their own solutions for that anymore either, since we have AWS, GCP, GKE, etc. However, we software engineers (as well as computer scientists and devs) tend to underestimate how much we've already learned and internalized. It becomes painfully obvious when you try to teach someone, and realize that you need to start at a much earlier point than you expected.

What's funny is that I have only worked for the big tech companies since I graduated and I know how to do all the backend stuff really well and thus I can do it in a few weeks for my side projects. However, the fronted code kills me and I keep stalling and getting confused on my new projects trying to figure out all the js/html/css to make it look really good for normal users...

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Where do you think those Ivy League educated can’t-do-anything people you interview everyday come from ?

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#289
post #253

I'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…

I'm going to state a very strong opinion here and know that it will backfire: families should be educating their kids themselves, and society should make this financially possible (let's start off with eliminating the dual-income family). Teachers, as they are currently qualified, should be adjuncts to the family school.

And then you repeat endlessly education inequalities.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#290

Grade inflation and extra credit are the two big items which let American schools down. A class should have a bell shaped curve after the final exam and extra credit should never be given as it's form of cheating the system.

Bell curves are a lie though. What if you taught well and everyone understood your lesson and they fared well on the test ? The French way of grading without a curve is much better in that aspect.
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