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Things I learned from teaching (2023)

claytonwramsey.com

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Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#11

Post by djtango »

photochemsyn wrote: post #4

Teaching is very difficult to do well, and if teaching isn't rewarded financially, well... would you want a 'passionate' doctor who was paid $50,000 a year and lived in a rented one-bedroom in the bad part of town treating you for cancer?

Thanks, I hadn't crystallised in my head that being a doctor has somehow become a passion industry for many countries (like the UK). It had all the hallmarks of a passion industry but my brain rejected drawing the connection presumably because medicine seem like a typical passion field (like videogames or art are).

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#12

Post by markles »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #8
photochemsyn wrote: post #4

Teaching is very difficult to do well, and if teaching isn't rewarded financially, well... would you want a 'passionate' doctor who was paid $50,000 a year and lived in a rented one-bedroom in the bad part of town treating you for cancer?

Why do people thinking teaching is any harder than any other job that requires a university education? You get trained; you get mentored; you get regular professional improvement. And, the bit about low wages always makes me chuckle. Everyone overlooks the lifetime earnings of a public school teacher: It is usually very good (much better than most boring office jobs), when you include the value of all benefits, inclu…

It's not harder than any other job, but it's harder than many. Teaching, especially in middle and high school, is not as technically difficult as say many developer roles, but it is far more difficult when it comes to organization, emotional resilience, multitasking, and managing people.

It requires you to not only keep 20+ twelve year olds from devolving into chaos, but to also teach them things many of them could care less about. Then, you need take into account the laws surrounding your choices both in and outside the school and your representation in front of administration and parents. In the age of cell phones any slip up will likely end up being online and possibly in the news.

Imagine, as a developer, if you every possible small mistake you made had the potential to find its way to Twitter or Reddit? What if you had to manage 20 different, but similar projects? You had to time your bathroom breaks because you can't go whenever you want. That your lunches were consumed with professional development sessions, emergency parent meetings, kids that need your help, etc... That every few months you had to meet with every single customer to give them an update and hear back how much your work is amazing or sucks? Oh, and you have to do it over a period of 10 hours sitting in a crappy hard plastic chair.

Put aside the fact that you have little agency to affect any real change, are potentially subject to verbal or even physical abuse you can do nothing about. Then there are the shootings...

Teaching is much harder than most jobs where you can stare at a monitor and post throwaways on Hackernews. Technically harder, no, it's not physics (unless you're teaching physics), but it's still a difficult field.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#13

Post by oldpersonintx »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #8
photochemsyn wrote: post #4

Teaching is very difficult to do well, and if teaching isn't rewarded financially, well... would you want a 'passionate' doctor who was paid $50,000 a year and lived in a rented one-bedroom in the bad part of town treating you for cancer?

Why do people thinking teaching is any harder than any other job that requires a university education? You get trained; you get mentored; you get regular professional improvement. And, the bit about low wages always makes me chuckle. Everyone overlooks the lifetime earnings of a public school teacher: It is usually very good (much better than most boring office jobs), when you include the value of all benefits, inclu…

[dead]

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#14

Post by oldpersonintx »

Edman274 wrote: post #10
throwaway2037 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people thinking teaching is any harder than any other job that requires a university education? You get trained; you get mentored; you get regular professional improvement. And, the bit about low wages always makes me chuckle. Everyone overlooks the lifetime earnings of a public school teacher: It is usually very good (much better than most boring office jobs), when you include the value of all benefits, inclu…

If the benefits and wages were so much better than "boring office jobs" then why would there be a teacher shortage in the absence of onerous requirements for entry? Why is there a teacher shortage if the pay and benefits are so good?

[dead]

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#15

Post by creesch »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #8
photochemsyn wrote: post #4

Teaching is very difficult to do well, and if teaching isn't rewarded financially, well... would you want a 'passionate' doctor who was paid $50,000 a year and lived in a rented one-bedroom in the bad part of town treating you for cancer?

Why do people thinking teaching is any harder than any other job that requires a university education? You get trained; you get mentored; you get regular professional improvement. And, the bit about low wages always makes me chuckle. Everyone overlooks the lifetime earnings of a public school teacher: It is usually very good (much better than most boring office jobs), when you include the value of all benefits, inclu…

> Why do people thinking teaching is any harder than any other job that requires a university education?

Because not every job that requires a university education is equally demanding. As you said, some of those office jobs are outright boring. Teaching is far from boring, but it can be incredibly draining as there are a lot of expectations to meet.

> including summer holiday

It is easy to look at this and ignore the fact that in order to teach properly, a teacher's workday isn't 9-5. It is in fact much longer and often work carries over in the weekend because papers need grading, lessons need to be prepared, etc, etc.

There is more to expand on here, but the way you dismissively phrased your comment makes me think you aren't really interested in constructive discussion about the subject.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#16

Post by cjs_ac »

The lecture-tutorial pedagogical model used in universities is called scholasticism and dates back to the middle ages. Books were very expensive, so in the lectures, the lecturer would just read out the relevant text for students to copy down, word for word. (In the more prestigious English universities, lecturers are still called 'Readers', and students say that they're 'reading' History or Computer Science rather than 'studying' it.) Once the students had their copies of the text, they would go away and read them, and then go to a tutorial where they would discuss what they'd read. This is where the real learning - and the creation of new knowledge - would happen.

The author mentions 'flipped learning': this is the modern equivalent of scholasticism. Read the text in your own time, and then have an in-person discussion or practical or workshop, depending on the nature of the subject matter.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#17

Post by throwaway2037 »

markles wrote: post #12
throwaway2037 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people thinking teaching is any harder than any other job that requires a university education? You get trained; you get mentored; you get regular professional improvement. And, the bit about low wages always makes me chuckle. Everyone overlooks the lifetime earnings of a public school teacher: It is usually very good (much better than most boring office jobs), when you include the value of all benefits, inclu…

It's not harder than any other job, but it's harder than many. Teaching, especially in middle and high school, is not as technically difficult as say many developer roles, but it is far more difficult when it comes to organization, emotional resilience, multitasking, and managing people. It requires you to not only keep 20+ twelve year olds from devolving into chaos, but to also teach them things many of them could c…

    > Then there are the shootings...
You must be from the US. If the old rule of Internet chat was that someone would (eventually) draw comparison to Adolf Hitler or German National Socialism period, then the new rule on HN is someone will raise the expectation of gun violence in the US.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#18

Post by n4r9 »

cjs_ac wrote: post #16

The lecture-tutorial pedagogical model used in universities is called scholasticism and dates back to the middle ages. Books were very expensive, so in the lectures, the lecturer would just read out the relevant text for students to copy down, word for word. (In the more prestigious English universities, lecturers are still called 'Readers', and students say that they're 'reading' History or Computer Science rather t…

> In the more prestigious English universities, lecturers are still called 'Readers'

At least in the University of Cambridge, a Reader is a specific academic role that is distinct from a lectureship and typically has very few teaching duties. It's often a stepping stone on the path to professorship. See e.g.

> The intention was to allow senior academics more time for research, lightening their load of routine teaching.

https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/university-archives/glossary/reade...

University of York also seems to focus mostly on scholarship over teaching:

> To become a Reader, you must demonstrate substantial intellectual distinction with a sustained contribution in research and scholarship, bestowing considerable external recognition on yourself and the University.

https://www.york.ac.uk/admin/hr/learning-and-development/art...

I've tried to search for similar pages in the other big unis but not had any luck.

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#19

Post by farrelle25 »

creesch wrote: post #15
throwaway2037 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people thinking teaching is any harder than any other job that requires a university education? You get trained; you get mentored; you get regular professional improvement. And, the bit about low wages always makes me chuckle. Everyone overlooks the lifetime earnings of a public school teacher: It is usually very good (much better than most boring office jobs), when you include the value of all benefits, inclu…

> Why do people thinking teaching is any harder than any other job that requires a university education? Because not every job that requires a university education is equally demanding. As you said, some of those office jobs are outright boring. Teaching is far from boring, but it can be incredibly draining as there are a lot of expectations to meet. > including summer holiday It is easy to look at this and ignore th…

Totally agree with this comment.

I've worked as a programmer, care assistant, office clerk and for 6 months as a Maths teacher in a UK Further Education College.

The teaching was incredibly demanding - way ahead of the other jobs. 6 hours a day engaging a class of 18-year-olds. Hours of marking and prep in the evening. Extra teaching at the Easter break. Marking at Christmas. Dealing with student mental health issues, drug issues, fights between gangs.

Had to leave for my own health and 1 other teacher just walked out mid-semester - 2 others were out on long-term sick leave.

Another sign it's a tough profession: there's ~ 2,800 teaching vaccancies in the UK at the moment [1] and schools struggle to recruit.

I've nothing but respect for those teachers that do it year after year.

[1] https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/teacher-vacancies-in-uk-in...

Re: Things I learned from teaching (2023)

#20

Post by maxmalkav »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #3

> Nobody goes to office hours This is rough. I was a student who really struggled with some courses during uni. I would estimate that 75% of professors that I visited were incredibly unwelcoming, no matter how much prep I had done before the visit. It really turned me off from asking for help. That said, I do believe that most of my uni professors were not passionate about teaching -- they wanted to do research, and…

Reflecting on my own experience on both sides, I can tell a generational difference.

As student, research-focused professors and some old timers made you feel unwelcome in office hours, a mixture of “you are wasting my time” and “you should have put more work on this, I’ll just give you some hints so I can send you away quick”. Many had in common being from a generation and country where university access was not so normalized and accessible to all social strata, just graduating came many times with some sense of entitlement.

Some years later and I’m the one assisting students during office hours. I could already sense some generational change, with younger professors and assistants treating students more like equals. They were exceptions of course, we had younger assistants cargo culting the worst attitude parts of old timers (fun enough they were usually from kind of privileged background, families with ties to the field or even de same department). The result was students from other groups kind-of/secretly attending my office hours and the ones from other nice colleagues.

Academia is its own kind of hell :-)

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