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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

#401

Post by shados »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #362
erikpukinskis wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can build an app, just as anyone can build a house. But if you want a roof that won’t rot for 20 years, you need to pay someone who knows how to build a proper house. By the same token, if you want an app that will still be maintainable in 5 years, you need a professional. An amateur can build most requirements, but the architecture will seize up if it’s just layers of hacks. It’s sort of an interesting situat…

Eh, I haven’t seen any evidence that experienced professionals can build a website that will last for 5 years either. Business requirements inevitably requires hacks and kludges, and abstraction layers implemented to deal with the problems of today become tomorrow’s layer that everyone wants to rewrite or refactor.

> I haven’t seen any evidence that experienced professionals can build a website that will last for 5 years either

You need a team of experienced professionals, which virtually no longer exists. You could work at 10 different companies back to back and not come across a team that can do it. That's the industry now.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#402

Post by JumpCrisscross »

abc-xyz wrote: post #358
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude towards customer-funded journalism promotes bad content and ad-driven models. It’s a valid choice. But understand the trade-offs for convenience and tracking you’re promoting.

How is he promoting tracking? The outline link has 3 cookies (0 third-party) and make 5 requests (the bad ones being Google Analytics and Doubleclick). Whereas the original article has 68 cookies (44 third party) and make 261 requests (which violates users privacy to a much greater extent).

Outline doesn’t pay the journalist. If partial paywalls fail, full paywalls à la the FT or ad-driven models must succeed. I’m okay with Archive.org links. But a private company replicating somebody else’s work without compensation nudges the world towards rich people consuming via subscription and the rest of us through tracking and ads.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#403

Post by emiliobumachar »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #41
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…

You're describing here a different problem, which I know from talking to teachers also causes them stress. The people who make the software cause this problem, not the teachers themselves. They often don't have a way to avoid this and they aren't the ones deciding what software is used.

Seconded. Showing "F" as a placeholder for pending data entry is a very, very bad idea. Equivalent to a hypothetical email software that autofills "Fuck you" if you don't type anything.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#404

Post by dorchadas »

lr4444lr wrote: post #147
whatshisface wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And then there's education classes. They're all jokes, and the "research" is so BSed it's not even funny. I knew someone who was taking these classes, they said the same thing. One time I saw a great takedown of education studies, but I could never find it again. Do you have any examples of or links describing the phenomenon how atrociously bad the education of educators is?

I don't know if you meant this one[0], but it's well known among maverick ed. researchers. Even though it focuses on special education, it generalizes well (and SpEd in fact has some of the highest quality research, because kids with diagnosed disabilities are much less likely to succeed when more politicized, faddish, and unproven methods are used). [0] http://eitaneldar.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Ten-Faulty-...

That's an interesting article, though I think I would disagree with assumption 3, at least as they apply towards non-special needs secondary school children.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#405

Post by dorchadas »

lr4444lr wrote: post #147
whatshisface wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And then there's education classes. They're all jokes, and the "research" is so BSed it's not even funny. I knew someone who was taking these classes, they said the same thing. One time I saw a great takedown of education studies, but I could never find it again. Do you have any examples of or links describing the phenomenon how atrociously bad the education of educators is?

I don't know if you meant this one[0], but it's well known among maverick ed. researchers. Even though it focuses on special education, it generalizes well (and SpEd in fact has some of the highest quality research, because kids with diagnosed disabilities are much less likely to succeed when more politicized, faddish, and unproven methods are used). [0] http://eitaneldar.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Ten-Faulty-...

That's an interesting article, though I think I would disagree with assumptions 3 and 4, at least as they apply towards non-special needs secondary school children.

But, that said, I agree with all 10 of his misguided notions. They're all issues. As a math teacher, I've mostly seen issues with 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 and 10, though they others have been prevalent some (except the special needs one; I have not worked in a special needs class nor have I had a collaborative class with special education students, only ESL learners). And number 3 especially hits a point with me, as so many of my students don't have fluency in basic math and it makes teaching Algebra 2 and Geometry a real pain in the ass.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#406

Post by kakarot »

tomohawk wrote: post #388
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm sorry if it seemed like I was putting words in your mouth. I did directly quote you.

I didn't become a software developer to document every minute action or go to meetings or explain complex concepts to clueless bosses or meet intense deadlines, I became a software developer to program. Yet...

Besides having more realistic expectations about my field due to exhaustive research, which in fact led me to change my mind about becoming a teacher or professor and just focusing on software development, I also trained myself extensively extracurricularly to be prepared for my job.

What motivates all of this is the salary and the control over my life which programming affords me.

Neither of those things are pluses about being a teacher. Their salaries are absolute garbage and get worse every year, and they have little control over how they structure their life. Most of the motivated public school teachers I knew growing up have moved into administrative positions because of this.

What ends up happening is that it's mostly just the inefficient people without foresight who remain in college for 4-6 years to become a teacher. The quality of applicants is directly tied to the quality of life afforded by the position. And in my opinion, public school teaching positions should be some of the highest-paid and highest-qualified jobs in the market, on par with college professors and junior to mid level engineers. At least more on par with what their administrators are already pocketing.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#407

Post by abc-xyz »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #402
abc-xyz wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is he promoting tracking? The outline link has 3 cookies (0 third-party) and make 5 requests (the bad ones being Google Analytics and Doubleclick). Whereas the original article has 68 cookies (44 third party) and make 261 requests (which violates users privacy to a much greater extent).

Outline doesn’t pay the journalist. If partial paywalls fail, full paywalls à la the FT or ad-driven models must succeed. I’m okay with Archive.org links. But a private company replicating somebody else’s work without compensation nudges the world towards rich people consuming via subscription and the rest of us through tracking and ads.

The articles will always be available through websites like outline, so you'd be much better off encouraging these publishers to stop violating users privacy, stop making horrible sites that autoplay videos, automatically load new pages if scroll too far, etc. Do that and then people will be less inclined to share outline links/post content in comments, and more inclined to turn off ad blocking if doing so won't result in all sorts of nasty tracking.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#408

Post by wallflower »

labster wrote: post #331
vanviegen wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So which is it? Are we asking middle school kids to come up with original research, or are we training them to be good factory workers? These statements seem to point in exact opposite directions.

Unfortunately, both. We ask kids to be on time, every day, sit orderly in their seats. Don't talk to neighbors, you're supposed to be at your job or learning. Collaboration is only allowed when authorized. Looking up information is only allowed when authorized. Any disruption is grounds for punishment, too many notices is grounds for dismissal, er, expulsion. And then these same kids are sent home and asked to comple…

Another comment mentioned John Taylor Gatto. If you are not yet familiar with his writings, check then out.

http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#409

Post by iheartpotatoes »

xamuel wrote: post #312
iheartpotatoes wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh hell, software dev is so, so very overloaded with underskilled programmers with fragile egos. They come out of college knowing a little python and javascript and can't do jack shit for at least a year, and just come to a screeching halt with every tough issue they encounter. I'm a project manager box in an org-chart to help un-flatten the management hierarchy (I manage 20+), I am constantly having to re-assign tic…

Unless your shop literally hires every warm body that walks in the door, you're still seeing things through survivor bias lenses. Even those inept kids are better than what you'd get if you opened the floodgates.

My god I hope you're correct. The problem is I'm not given a "new employee time buffer": the SLA is king, and even though I get budget to train (free lunches!!!) it isn't fully internalized that increasing customers at a rate faster than growing / training tech support is untenable.

I've been here 4 years, and some of the new-hires that came on my first year are now able to support mutliple projects and getting their sea-legs, but the burden on the senior programmers is still heavy, and I'm doing my best to retain those saints! Perhaps there will be an inflection point that doesn't involve customers and managers freaking out.

Or, heh, perhaps I'M the weak link.

Re: Teachers Quit Jobs at Highest Rate on Record

#410

Post by iheartpotatoes »

sizzle wrote: post #334
iheartpotatoes wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh hell, software dev is so, so very overloaded with underskilled programmers with fragile egos. They come out of college knowing a little python and javascript and can't do jack shit for at least a year, and just come to a screeching halt with every tough issue they encounter. I'm a project manager box in an org-chart to help un-flatten the management hierarchy (I manage 20+), I am constantly having to re-assign tic…

If this a symptom of bad hiring practices in your organization of representative across the tech industry? How do you know your org isn't to blame?

That's entirely possible. The founders are promising customizations as a way of getting new sales, and I think that is the main problem here: trying to grow business faster than support. I kinda see their dilemma: they don't want to grow the # of employees TOO fast, but right now we're not growing fast enough, and the complexity of customizations is non-trivial. This might be early growing pains in an immature business. But I was bitching about the self-starter trends among new hires.
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