Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nobody wants to teach anymore

jessicalexicus.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 1001 posts

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#171

Post by trident5000 »

_vdpp wrote: post #98

A few random thoughts: 1. For as much as we spend on education, teachers seem to be grossly underpaid - to be getting robbed of their share of the budget. Where does that money go? 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others. 3. Teachers frequently complain about how they are unappreciated, yet children spend _12 years_ in their care. Why do people come up to them and say they hated s…

Controversial opinion here (maybe?) but I think the purge of men from education has had a real impact on child behavior and learning.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/02/the-ex...

"...men continued to make up most of the high-school teaching force until the late 1970s"

Humans are still largely primal and male presence tends to instill respect and behavior changes in younger people; I suspect the absence of it has not helped the current situation in many schools.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#172

Post by strken »

sidlls wrote: post #30
a-dub wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is a way of expressing respect in market economies, it's called money.

Money will not overcome the "those who can't, teach" sentiment that runs quite strongly in the US. There is a very strong anti-intelligence (not merely anti-intellectual) sentiment in this country. It will help, and we should certainly pay teachers more, but it isn't the whole solution.

"Those who can't, teach" is the result of systematically underpaid teachers. There are two groups who go into teaching: those who like it so much they're willing to take less pay, and those who are drawn to the profession because the pay is competitive with the other jobs they're capable of.

Money is not sufficient to overcome the problem on its own, but it is necessary, and not having enough of it caused the problem.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#173

Post by forgotusername6 »

zarzavat wrote: post #46

The problem/solution is YouTube. There is prestige in being a YouTube super-teacher like 3B1B, teaching millions of people. There is no prestige in teaching kids at a local high school who don't even want to learn. The smart people who once might have found their vocation in teaching, now prefer to set up YouTube channels. The role of teacher is splitting into content makers and babysitters.

YouTube teaching is inherently one sided. There is significantly more to teaching than that. Tailoring the lesson to the individual, being able to immediately respond to questions, knowing when someone doesn't understand. These things are super important for great teaching. YouTube and online one sided teaching courses are never going to be able to beat that.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#174

Post by powerhour »

seibelj wrote: post #148
powerhour wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> competition would force public schools to improve or shut down as every school vied for the vouchers. I don't know how to fairly evaluate a school's performance. I guess we could ask if the students perform better in the job market 10-20 years later, but that's not obviously not helpful or useful information on which to make a decision now. I get why the voucher system is appealing on first glance. After all, you o…

You don’t seem to know how to evaluate them, yet everyone agrees Harvard is better than your local community college, and there is literally a private school half a mile from my house that charges $60,000 per year. So clearly some people know how to distinguish a bad school from a good school and allocate their money appropriately.

College is pretty different than grade school. It's a lot easier for adults to understand whether or not they're learning well and to see where people end up following graduation. You'd have a hard time convincing me that the way an 8 year old is taught today will lead to better results in better outcomes decades later (after those that ran the schools have retired and have thus left the market).

Further, how many Harvard-level grade schools do you think we can run as a society? Given that private school pay is substantially worse than public school pay on average, how could one say that private schools, again on average, would outperform public schools?

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#175

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

ekianjo wrote: post #150
RobotToaster wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people hate lawyers, but plenty of people still want to be one.

> but plenty of people still want to be one The much higher salary makes up for it, but you can't seriously expect teachers to get the same salary as lawyers.

Many teachers have better education than lawyers.

One of the reasons that the NEA is such a powerful union, is that its members, are, by definition, educated to a Masters Degree, or better.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#176

Post by r3trohack3r »

> Nobody wants to teach

Counterpoint: the internet is full of people who want to teach. The first school of YouTube is overflowing with educational content on everything from merge sort to patching dry-wall. A large portion of my social circle hold teaching/mentorship as a career goal. I don't think this is pedantic. When I look around, I see a surplus of people that want to learn and want to teach.

What I don't see is people storming the gates for a horribly broken system that robs many humans of their best years while inflicting lifelong trauma. A position that is horribly underpaid relative to the demands of the job (so you aren't doing it for money) and isn't allowed to meaningfully improve things (so you aren't doing it to "make a difference" unless you think putting on a smile is going to substantially change the outcome, which it sometimes does.)

I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. If you can provide a service at any standard of quality, list jobs at any standard of quality and pay, and the demand never dries up; there really is no incentive to fix things. At some point the education system in its current form needs to collapse.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#177

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

areoform wrote: post #125
zarzavat wrote: post #46

The problem/solution is YouTube. There is prestige in being a YouTube super-teacher like 3B1B, teaching millions of people. There is no prestige in teaching kids at a local high school who don't even want to learn. The smart people who once might have found their vocation in teaching, now prefer to set up YouTube channels. The role of teacher is splitting into content makers and babysitters.

Believe it or not, YouTube is not good pedagogy. A YouTube video doesn't help you to fill in the gaps of your understanding by re-working a difficult concept with you. A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism. Educational content is amazing, but it's not teaching. It's a resource. It's like saying that the exist…

"A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism."—neither will 99.9% of teachers. Most of them out of sheer incompetence, impatience, and general inadequacy to be around children, some due to the fact that there are 30+ children in the classroom and they literally don't have the time and energy for that kind of effort. I am not speaking about American schools with 25K+/year tuition fee in NYC, I am speaking about teachers in a general classroom in Punta Arenas, Chile or a general classroom in Kruševac, Serbia.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#178

Post by zozbot234 »

areoform wrote: post #125
zarzavat wrote: post #46

The problem/solution is YouTube. There is prestige in being a YouTube super-teacher like 3B1B, teaching millions of people. There is no prestige in teaching kids at a local high school who don't even want to learn. The smart people who once might have found their vocation in teaching, now prefer to set up YouTube channels. The role of teacher is splitting into content makers and babysitters.

Believe it or not, YouTube is not good pedagogy. A YouTube video doesn't help you to fill in the gaps of your understanding by re-working a difficult concept with you. A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism. Educational content is amazing, but it's not teaching. It's a resource. It's like saying that the exist…

> A YouTube video doesn't help you to fill in the gaps of your understanding by re-working a difficult concept with you. A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism.

Video is a replacement for teacher-centered lectures, that don't do these things either. Of course the tutoring part of education is also important.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#179

Post by _vdpp »

chadash wrote: post #134
_vdpp wrote: post #98

A few random thoughts: 1. For as much as we spend on education, teachers seem to be grossly underpaid - to be getting robbed of their share of the budget. Where does that money go? 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others. 3. Teachers frequently complain about how they are unappreciated, yet children spend _12 years_ in their care. Why do people come up to them and say they hated s…

> Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. Throwing more money into schools won’t ever fix this problem. I was a disruptive child and my parents were the opposite of people who didn’t give a shit. Both of them highly valued education and spent plenty of time with me. they just had to contend with a child who wasn’t well behaved at school and it was genetics more than anything they…

That’s valid, there are different kinds of disruptive kids.

A good friend of mine at high school was very bright, kind of a troublemaker, diagnosed with ADHD, took prescription Ritalin, was a bit of a pain in the ass with his teachers, but had parents who cared and he ended up graduating and doing fine.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#180

Post by srdone »

sidlls wrote: post #84
viraptor wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most qualified high school physics teachers have way differently valued skillsets in the labor force by alternate employers than most kindergarten teachers. Do they? I read that as implying that physics teachers could potentially get some stem jobs. But is that actually true? If you can do math, you can teach yourself enough physics to teach in high school. But that gets you nowhere near the knowledge necessary for…

"If you can do math, you can teach yourself enough physics to teach in high school." No, you can't. Even at the high school level there is jargon, historical methodology, and domain-specific nuance that isn't accessible to the self-taught. That's true for almost any subject one might think of, in fact.

What prevents anyone from learning all they need about any subject on their own? If someone is capable of reading, it seems to me they could teach themselves any subject using books. Of course, having a good teacher to guide them in which sources to read, etc, would greatly speed up the process of learning. However, I don’t see any reason someone cannot learn any subject on their own.
Post reply on HN