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Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

adamcadre.ac

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Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#631

Post by mattkrause »

jliptzin wrote: post #416
mattkrause wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The analysis is harder than that. I would imagine education degrees are not particularly versatile: they’re meant to train you to become a teacher, more or less. Given that, it is not particularly surprising that teaching is one of the better-paying options once you commit to that pathway. However, there are plenty of other, career tracks: potential teachers might become accountants or engineers instead. Zooming in a…

I would say it’s the opposite. Vacation time has more incremental value the longer it goes on. Even a 2 week vacation I’d have trouble fully unwinding from. An entire summer, you can truly have some quality time to yourself to recharge, focus on a hobby, travel a lot, etc. I would say those summers off are easily worth $100k.

It’s tricky.

Taking things to an obviously absurd extreme, being unemployed is clearly not worth $400k/year: people work for far, far less.

As you say, longer blocks of vacation time definitely open up new possibilities, but perhaps there’s an inflection point: an 11-week trip seems like it’d be very nearly the same as a 10 week one.

Things get weird when much of the total comp is in benefits. For example, if your cash salary is $50k, that limits what you can do with your $100k “worth” of vacation.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#632

Post by zozbot234 »

hn8788 wrote: post #626
nefitty wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP mentioned not “showing up”, not “putting in effort”, not doing homework and disruptiveness as indications that a child is a loser and not worth the resources it would take to make them productive adults. All those things are either signs of a difficult home environment or a learning disability. I haven’t read all the replies yet but I’m surprised at the lack of reactions to OP classifying some children as losers b…

> All those things are either signs of a difficult home environment or a learning disability. That's not true, some kids are just shitheads and don't feel like listening to anyone or doing what they're told. Personal responsibility has to come into play at some point, you can't just blame every problem on external factors.

As an extreme case re: your point, OP mentions students who were actually setting stuff on fire at their school. Why the heck is police not getting involved at that point? We're talking actual, serious criminal behavior that can also be predictive of further crimes later in life if unaddressed, so some very real consequences are definitely called for, to try and set these kids straight. An ounce of prevention can save a pound of cure.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#633

Post by gverrilla »

I find this report very funny because it ultimately places responsability upon administration. As if the curriculum and pedagogy weren't flawed to the bones, and as if the body of teachers knew any better. Your students are trying to burn the school, literally. Your classes and your method of evaluation suck. They contain the genesis of both the idiocracy and also the cleptocracy. Your debates are repetetive, meaningless and repetetively meaningless. I hope you never even get even one more inch of power. Eventually the rebellion of the slaves will succeed.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#634

Post by hef19898 »

austincheney wrote: post #629
hef19898 wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the effort in takes to turn those kids into someone worthwhile Hell, you know you talk about human beings here, not some production ressource, right? The number of posts in this thread along the very same line, why bother with all those loosers at all if the bright ones could become a brain surgeon, is mind boggling. And IMHO hints at the cause of a lot of problems wr have in our society right now. Let me guess, yo…

A productive education system should dedicate resources to students equally with voluntary options for students who perform outside the norm. That means not disproportionately dedicating resources to students who fail aside from tutoring outside class. Some students just deserve to fail. It is better find that out early instead of lying to children that everything is great and kicking the can down the road to the sho…

IMHO education is about giving everyone the u same opportunity, regardless of social circumstances. Evey study I know of shows, that the later you start to separate children the better of they are globally. That means that a school system faced with tremendous social imbalances has to ready to cope, and cover, those.

Higher educated parents have it easier helping their children with homework. They have the money and time for extra tutoring. Lower education equals less capabilities to support with homework, most often less time and certainly less money for extra tutoring. If a system is such you only succeed when you fall in the first group, it sucks. Supporting such a system, wholeheartedly as some on here seem to, is just cold hearted.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#635

Post by hef19898 »

nikanj wrote: post #628
hef19898 wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the effort in takes to turn those kids into someone worthwhile Hell, you know you talk about human beings here, not some production ressource, right? The number of posts in this thread along the very same line, why bother with all those loosers at all if the bright ones could become a brain surgeon, is mind boggling. And IMHO hints at the cause of a lot of problems wr have in our society right now. Let me guess, yo…

I believe a large portion of HN visitor got their lunch money stolen and toys broken by these loser kids. Bullied kids grow up to despise bullies, and bullying usually goes hand-in-hand with being a poor student

The worst bullies I saw where from well off families. Still weren't the brightest, but that had definitely nothing to do with social circumstances. In fact, those socially handicapped kids were those being bullied. That was on a German Gymnasium, so on the road to higher education.

Obviously, social dynamics will be different in lower tier schools. I do have the impression that we are not discussing those here.

Also, being bullied is a poor excuse of becoming a bully yourself.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#636

Post by MomoXenosaga »

neartheplain wrote: post #623
MomoXenosaga wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my country parents can choose which school they send their kids to. You get "white schools". Parents always want the best for their children and this predictably leads to full segregation. I am actually surprised how egalitarian and inclusive the US is when it comes to education!

There are many good reasons to de-racialize the discussion around US public education. One is that the "white school" trope is increasingly out of date. Instead, we've begun to see "Asian schools" wherever high-performing public high school schools admit students based on standardized testing. The top-ranked high school in the entire US, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, is 65% Asian and 23% wh…

That is true its more about economic status now. We have made some considerable progress in opening up the middle class to immigrants.

To paraphrase MLK "judged not on the colour of their skin but on the size of their parents' bank accounts". So many doors magically open to you when your parents have money.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#637

Post by ByteJockey »

laurencerowe wrote: post #441
lettergram wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

School choice would go a long way and breakup the teachers unions (through school choice). School choice effectively allows increased wages for good teachers and yes there's competition so you'll have lower end schools as well. However, it'll be a rising ship, which raises all boats IMO. You can also audit the schools and shutdown poorly run ones, etc.

> School choice effectively allows increased wages for good teachers and yes there's competition so you'll have lower end schools as well. How does school choice allow for increased teacher wages? Presumably they get the same per-student funding. When the school gets more applicants than places, how does it decide who to let in? > You can also audit the schools and shutdown poorly run ones, etc. Shutting down schools…

> How does school choice allow for increased teacher wages? Presumably they get the same per-student funding.

The raw number of dollars per pupil isn't the only variable here, if it were the US would already have the best schools pretty much everywhere (the US spends WAY more than the average in this category).

There's also what percentage is spent on administrators instead of teachers (frees up money for teacher salaries), various QoL improvements that could be made such as less paperwork, more latitude in how they teach, hiring a few full-time graders to take some of the load off teachers (generally a big time-sink and a source of a lot of overtime for teachers).

> When the school gets more applicants than places, how does it decide who to let in?

Presumably either entrance exam or lottery depending on the philosophy of the school.

> Seems preferable to intervene and improve failing schools before it gets to the point of shutting them down.

Do we know how to do this in practice? I haven't heard of any tactics that reliably improve a school that has started going downhill, but if you have some examples, I'd definitely be willing to consider them.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#638

Post by jl2718 »

spoonjim wrote: post #554

I’ve noticed that in the time since I was a kid, the focus of public school has shifted from about the 40th percentile student to the 5th percentile student. In my school, the entire focus of the operation was the decent student... the one who showed up, put in a decent effort, did at least three quarters of their homework. The school had tremendous resources for these kids to go to college, and the very best college…

The theory behind this is NOT that the poor students will become productive and valuable members of society.

It is that they will become criminals if you don’t do everything you can for them, and one criminal is more costly to society than the marginal benefits of that money to 100 successful students.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#639

Post by rmah »

zozbot234 wrote: post #579
GGfpc wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "difficult" kids in school are the ones who need help the most. They either have learning disabilities or difficult family/social situations that lead them to either not try or not care about school. To say that teachers should put less effort into these kids due to "low ROI" is frankly very privileged.

> The "difficult" kids in school are the ones who need help the most. Schools do very little to help these kids. There are ways to teach low-performers efficiently (they go under the general rubric of "direct instruction") but they go unused simply because teachers do not want to feel regimented in such a rigid structure, even if that's exactly what yields the best outcomes. (So, I'd definitely disagree with GP that…

Very little? In my town's school district, something like 30% of the school's budget is allocated to these "difficult kids". Who make up less than 5% of the student body. They get a LOT of attention and extra help. As far as I can tell though, it doesn't help much.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#640

Post by zozbot234 »

jl2718 wrote: post #638
spoonjim wrote: post #554

I’ve noticed that in the time since I was a kid, the focus of public school has shifted from about the 40th percentile student to the 5th percentile student. In my school, the entire focus of the operation was the decent student... the one who showed up, put in a decent effort, did at least three quarters of their homework. The school had tremendous resources for these kids to go to college, and the very best college…

The theory behind this is NOT that the poor students will become productive and valuable members of society. It is that they will become criminals if you don’t do everything you can for them, and one criminal is more costly to society than the marginal benefits of that money to 100 successful students.

I'm going to repeat some stuff I said in a sibling comment, but OP mentions students who actually set $#!+ on fire at their school, and the only semblance of correctional action for this serious, criminal behavior was five days(!) of in-school suspension. No mention of police being seriously involved, as would be entirely proper given these circumstances. This is emphatically not how you'd try to save these kids from a life of crime; it has the exact opposite effect.
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