Both parents were teachers and spoke strongly against the profession when they retired 15 years ago. My exit/retirement strategy from this IT circus was always teaching but I guess I could revisit that for midnight shift as a DC tech somewhere.
Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
381–390 of 420 posts
Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or you were giving too much work, and it was reflecting and multiplying on your side. What would have happened if you gave the amount of work that would have reflected on you a normal amount to grade, assuming an 8 hour day/5 day week? Simply put: why do you punish students, and then complain (and not do your work) when you assign too much, by your very own standards?
For me, to give an amount of work for students as to not extend my week beyond 40 hours would have meant no more than 45 minutes of non-instruction time per day. Lesson planning for one day typically took longer than that, aided by the fact as I taught three courses. So, out the gate, there is no time for homework, assessments, projects, student help outside class time, tracking grades, reaching out to parents when k…
Wow, things have changed since I got out of school (HS grad 2000).
I remember being drowned in homework. And after getting out, I heard my former teachers complain just how much work they had to put in to keep up. (I did a stint substituting not long after.)
My question fell on deaf ears: why assign so much homework, if it reflects back on you x $number_of_students ? And homework also tends to select for families that can help with the homework load (moderately high income, free time, stable family, 9-5 jobs). If your kids and their parents fall outside that, they're probably going to do badly.
But still, there's technological ways to reduce your own personal load. Every hour past 40/week is billable free time. And unless it's a significantly rare event, you probably shouldn't be doing this, or negotiate for more money reflecting your higher workload.
You could also potentially get rid of homework completely. The students are already spending 8 hours in classes. And if 5 teachers add their hour in, that's a 13 hour day for students. Pretty sure that's not deemed as healthy with regards to sleep. But from the article, it appears the 'better' answer is that teachers and instructors are leaving in droves.
Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 there are lots of drop-dead deadlines with no possibility of extension, usually imposed by external constraints. What I find interesting is that people like to talk about how much harder the real world is than school... but that just isn't my experience. At work? as far as I can tell, 70% means I get a pretty good raise. A really good raise if one of the things I got done was really impressive. (th…
At work? If you aren't good at something, but are really good at other things? they give the things you are terrible at to other people. In school? they make you spend all your time on that thing you are terrible at.
That’s very true. My last four jobs were supposedly for a “full stack developer”, but it didn’t take long for managers to realize that when I told them up front, my weakness was on the front end and any pages I design look like something you would see on Geocities was not an exaggeration. Once they realized I was telling the truth, they stopped assigning me front end work.
In high school, I was forced to take Art classes - hilarity ensued. I’ve never been in favor of participation trophies but the B I got was definitely a “participation grade”.
Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is often the case for internal comms in a large company overran with administrators / coordinators. Yet parents are more like customers than colleagues - and no operation can ignore 90% of external / customer comms and stay alive (to say nothing of effective!)
Parents aren’t customers in a government school. Customers pay money. Parents are stakeholders, along with teachers, the teachers union and local politicians who compete for teachers votes. Children are not stakeholders because they have no power and their opinions are irrelevant. A government school has an enormous advantage over private schools in that it’s free at the point of use. You can be a lot worse than the…
> Children are not stakeholders because they have no power and their opinions are irrelevant
I think I see your point of view, but IMO that is too narrow a definition of "stakeholder".
One of the more commonly-accepted definitions of "stakeholder", at least from a project-management standpoint, would be:
"an individual, group, or organization, who may affect, be affected by, or perceive itself to be affected by a decision, activity, or outcome of a project"
Even in my work, I tend to think of stakeholders as those who stand to lose or gain based on the outcome -- literally, those who have a stake in the outcome. Many of them are active participants, but not always.
Just my 2 cents... I might be far from typical in this viewpoint.
Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#385One of my favourite hypotheticals to play out is what would be like if we somehow paid public school teachers and emergency services/law enforcement professionals an extreme of today, a million usd a year, and increased the difficulty to attain this work. I usually end up in a pretty good place but I'd be curious what others think/why this couldn't work?
> I usually end up in a pretty good place but I'd be curious why this could not work? It would be fantastically expensive. Chicago has 21,000 teachers. Paying them $1 million per year would cost $21 billion, dwarfing the city's current $3.8 billion budget. Even paying them $100,000 per year on average would cost half the city's budget. And there is little reason to believe it would yield better results. American teac…
If the fully loaded headcount cost of a CPS teacher isn't north of $100,000 I'll be pretty surprised. CPS teachers are well-compensated. Their median salary is $71,000, and they get good health insurance and a defined-benefit pension plan.
I live in Oak Park, just on the outskirts of Chicago, and the median teacher cash comp at my kids' high school is something like $120,000.
Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least in America, most teachers are expected to take home work and spend a large portion of time outside of the strict 6-8 school day doing lesson planning, grading, etc. Their wages are quickly approaching what you would expect at a fry cook position yet Wendy's doesn't give you four hours of extra homework a night. We are headed for a giant education crisis because we overwork and underpay under-qualified teache…
All of the most successful teachers I had placed tight boundaries on when they worked. They were organized, fast, and efficient. One history teacher I had only ever gave essay tests. He would have them all graded by 4pm. As one class was taking the exam, he would grade the previous class's essays. He had been a colonel in the army, and so had learned how to be ruthlessly efficient. One of the best teachers I had. Sim…
Comments like these frequently crack me up. Paraphrasing:
> Teachers are terrible because they work at a government job. People don't learn anything good from working in a government job. The most successful teacher I knew he already knew how to be efficient so he was successful.
And where did he learn that? Oh a former Colonl? You mean from a government job?
It always reminds me of the signs you see people holding, saying "The government had better keep it's hands off my medicare"
Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As someone noted above, the ratio of administrators (especially in district offices) and the actual teachers teaching kids has narrowed recently.
I remember reading an article of Michelle Rhee when she was head of Washington DC School district. At beginning of her term, she got lost in the district HQ and walked into a room where a lady was sitting in front of a computer. Rhee asked what her job was, and she couldn't answer. And soon enough, a purge of the HQ district office was implemented.
You can agree with her or not, but no doubt there is a lot of unnecessary people on payroll in places like school district HQ.
Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of the most successful teachers I had placed tight boundaries on when they worked. They were organized, fast, and efficient. One history teacher I had only ever gave essay tests. He would have them all graded by 4pm. As one class was taking the exam, he would grade the previous class's essays. He had been a colonel in the army, and so had learned how to be ruthlessly efficient. One of the best teachers I had. Sim…
Comments like these frequently crack me up. Paraphrasing: > Teachers are terrible because they work at a government job . People don't learn anything good from working in a government job. The most successful teacher I knew he already knew how to be efficient so he was successful. And where did he learn that? Oh a former Colonl? You mean from a government job? It always reminds me of the signs you see people holding,…
Thanks for putting words in my mouth.
My point is that teachers do not become teachers to do paperwork. They become teachers to teach. However, their job is defined by government administrators who measure everything by how much paperwork is done.
Teachers are receiving the wrong training and have the wrong expectations, so they are leaving.
Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#389There'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…
My SO quit HS STEM teaching recently, so I have at least some idea of the modern teaching environment. The issue, for my SO, was pay and benefits vs. hassle. My SO has a PhD and decided to give back to the community at an 'impoverished' school. Ho boy, was that a mistake. The first school was a terrible experience and my SO went gray from the place. Though there are a few parents that are as described in the parent comment, the vast majority of parents were all but useless. The HS my SO taught at, and I am not making this up, has a mandatory grading format for every single test/HW given: multiple choice only, only 4 choices are allowed. Combining that with the faux-restorative-justice [0] grading scale, where a 25% score in a class was considered 'passing', and even a goldfish could pass the classes. Yet still, the graduation rate was ~30%, only because of the Air Force Base nearby. Just trying to get the kids to even take the test was impossible, let alone the truancy. The teacher drop-out rate by December was ~50%. Neighboring schools had teacher drop-out rates near 90%. Yes, teacher drop-out rates. Thing is, poverty and racism and violence suck really bad. The many of the parents were desperately poor, ~80% of the children were on free and reduced lunch, and many of those would not eat all weekend long, let alone the apple vs Cheetos 'food desert' debate. Then the physical abuse of the children comes in, and 'home' is not a safe place at all. Then the sexual abuse kicks in, and home is REALLY not a safe place for a some of the teen girls my SO taught. Then you have the flagrant use of phones, the sexting, the porn use, the gore, etc. in the middle of 40+ child classrooms. It was/is a mad-house. It's no wonder all the more well off folks refuse to send their kids to public schools. God knows we would/will.
And my SO, with a PhD and therefore 'top' level seniority in the union pay-scale, made ~40k in a large, expensive US city with median houses at ~0.5 million. The benefits were, otherwise, ok-ish. No dental, no vision. The pension (yes, they still have one!) has been gutted since 2008 and is massively underfunded, so a total-write off.
Now my SO works in the field that the PhD was/is in and pulls ~80k with amazing benefits/401k. Teaching, like my SO had to do, was in no way worth any of it. My SO did time in 'service' to the local community and now considers the dues paid.
[0] Actually, restorative justice models are pretty brilliant, if implemented properly. I think they should be the norm.
Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record
#390There'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…
Calculus? Freshman college calculus, never took it. Just read a book and started the class on sophomore calculus. Teaching calculus? Been there; done that, as a math grad student. Easy to teach -- off the back of my hand. Zero time for preparation. Now with D. Knuth's TeX, it would be easy to pass out very nicely polished class notes, examples, exercises, applications, etc. Here's an application that might interest t…
The post has a fairly serious real world, war story example of where some calculus did something significant in business and the calculus was actually quite easy, no course in differential equations needed, and basically a routine exercise in first calculus. Students might like to see that; calculus teachers might like to show it to them. That is, just first calculus can already make some significant contact with the real world.
For the girl whose mother wants her daughter to go to Princeton, I mentioned some more in calculus that might be impressive for Princeton and make moot the student's A-.
Indeed, there was long Harvard's Math 55 where the three texts were Halmos, Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces, Rudin, Principles of Mathematical Analysis, and Spivak, Calculus on Manifolds. The course was something of a math boot camp and aimed at freshmen. There was an article on the course at
http://www.american.com/archive/2008/march-april-magazine-co...
maybe no longer available. For a high school student to have done well in that material might be impressive at Princeton. Linear algebra is perfectly accessible to high school students, basically easier than calculus, although the classic by Halmos may be regarded as better for a second course. The Rudin text I mentioned. And the third edition of that Rudin text contains the core of what is in the Spivak text.
If that girl and her mother want to pursue such things, then I'd recommend that the two of them chat with a good college math prof once each three months or so, maybe once a month. Working in a small group that also chats with a college math prof occasionally would also be good.
I also mentioned some introductions to stochastic optimal control that are accessible to high school students.
For the more advanced material, the students might regard that as a destination on the horizon.
I did the high school calculus teachers and their students and that mother and her daughter a favor, possibly valuable for them and not easy to find elsewhere.
Moreover, I know what I'm talking about: I studied calculus, advanced calculus, measure theory, and probability theory based on measure theory, and much more, hold a Ph.D. in pure and applied math from a world class research university, and have published peer-reviewed original research using advanced calculus, measure theory, and probability theory based on measure theory. My Ph.D. dissertation was in stochastic optimal control. Did I mention I know what I'm talking about? I did them a favor.