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The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

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Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#181

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

rdtsc wrote: post #12

Great points. This, I think is one of the fundamental problems: --- If parents and local decision-makers really value education (and there is a small portion of the community that does), student and teacher morale would be much different. --- The overall environment matters more than the teacher. We've mentioned it here not too long ago as well. Doesn't matter how fancy the workbooks and new materials or how hard we…

> Many students come poor and/or bad families. No new "Common Core" tests are going to help that child learn if they are afraid they might not eat dinner that evening or they will be beaten up by their drunken family members. Just flogging the teacher to teach harder won't work.

This sounds true if you don't think about it too hard.

But why is it that kids who don't suffer get about the same (horrible) education as the ones you mention?

> It would be nice if "teaching" was considered just as a prestigious profession as laywer, doctor, astronaut

It would be nice for teachers. But this is the same kind of half-assed thinking that makes public schools worthless. Instead of making things better for children/students, you've slipped into talking about making things better for teachers. It's like the entire country subconsciously belongs to the teachers' union.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#182

Post by deong »

FeeTinesAMady wrote: post #141
deong wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You seem to be assuming that it's impossible to bail out the bank's clients and let the bank itself fail, but that is not, in fact, impossible. It probably was impossible. Banks don't just function as holding pens for your money. They're (by design) overly leveraged based on the idea that not everyone will want their money at the same time. If the bank fails, you need to come up with all the money at once, and ther…

But all that would have been needed would be for the money that the government used to bail out the banks instead go directly to the depositors, and for the government to seize all the bank's assets to help pay for that. All they would need would be the relevant records. That would only be impossible if the depositors had so much money invested in the banks that there wasn't enough to cover them. Was that the case?

> That would only be impossible if the depositors had so much money invested in the banks that there wasn't enough to cover them. Was that the case?

Well, you're probably right in that I think there would have been enough money between the banks' assets and the amount the government contributed to cover the amount immediately owed. Probably. I'm just guessing really, but let's say that's true.

What would the next day have looked like? My guess is that the banks who weren't already failing probably would start to fail very quickly. My guess is that if you let the "bad" banks actually fail and cease operations, with the federal government giving out hundreds of billions of dollars in deposit guarantees directly to the people, you'd have had lines at the banks the next day as everyone else rushed to get their money out of the banks that hadn't failed yet.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#183

Post by akshatpradhan »

rossta wrote: post #127

I taught middle school science in Houston for five years. I decided to leave the traditional public school system for many of the same reasons the author makes about his experience. This was over a decade ago so it's sad to hear the same problems persist. Alternatives like charter schools have not always fared well, but some, like YES College Prep ( http://www.yesprep.org/ ), are serving low income areas and achievin…

Actually, we do have a shortage of Doctors, especially Primary Care. Caps are set in place by Medicare to limit the number of residents in an academic program. Academic hospitals would love to increase their slots but Medicare won't allow that. I think last year something like 23k students applied to residency programs and only 6k got accepted. What happens to the rejected 17k students as they wander aimlessly to figure out what next? Re-apply next year?

I think the cap is set by Medicare because they pay the Residents salary across the nation.

6000 students * $60k resident salary = $360,000,000

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#184

Post by xaa »

a-saleh wrote: post #86
w1ntermute wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the problem is community, why not take the students/families who really do care (from all the schools in a metropolitan area) and put them all in the same school? That would at least be a start.

We had this on a school level. I am from different country and educational system, but have seen the pattern for several years as I was attending. After first 4 years of school, all the classmates were split according to some equivalent of GPA. Because we had 4 classes in a year (class as a group of students sharing a room and a schedule), it resulted in one full of very good students, two more or less mixed and one…

In many US schools, there is a similar system: gifted programs (in elementary), pre-AP (middle school), and AP (high school) segregate the "gifted" kids from the rest.

I think it actually helps the gifted students. A lot. The best teachers want to teach in the "gifted" track, because there is a lot more participation and interest, and they can move faster because they don't have to teach to the lowest common denominator.

Unfortunately, while every student can learn, they cannot all learn at the same rate. This is why "no child left behind"-like strategies fail: not all students are equal, and a focus on those who are behind inevitably penalizes those who are ahead.

While good teachers can indeed bring students who are behind further back to parity, it is unfair to lump the burden of environmental and biological differences between students onto teachers, who have to bring them all to a pre-determined standard.

Ultimately, school policy has to acknowledge that it is of the highest priority to thoroughly educate the gifted students, who will become society's future leaders and knowledge workers. As a liberal who is concerned about income inequality, it pains me to admit these things, but that's the way it is.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#185

Post by rdtsc »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #181
rdtsc wrote: post #12

Great points. This, I think is one of the fundamental problems: --- If parents and local decision-makers really value education (and there is a small portion of the community that does), student and teacher morale would be much different. --- The overall environment matters more than the teacher. We've mentioned it here not too long ago as well. Doesn't matter how fancy the workbooks and new materials or how hard we…

> Many students come poor and/or bad families. No new "Common Core" tests are going to help that child learn if they are afraid they might not eat dinner that evening or they will be beaten up by their drunken family members. Just flogging the teacher to teach harder won't work. This sounds true if you don't think about it too hard. But why is it that kids who don't suffer get about the same (horrible) education as t…

The main gist was that environment (which includes home environment and cultural attitudes) play a very large role.

Having a bad environment at home will hinder learning, now matter how good the teacher are.

Having message from society that if you are a teacher, you probably weren't smart enough to become a lawyer, engineer, startup founder. That is reflected in both compensation, autonomy (like in this case) and other things.

There was talk here (or maybe Reddit, I forgot) about how someone from Finland (a country with pretty high math scores, compared to US) did a study to find the impact teachers had. It turned out not to be as much as US thinks it is. Not enough to punish teachers if some standardized scores are not met. And as a hypothetical experiment they said "Let's imagine we transplanted teacher from Finland to Indiana,US", would that dramatically change test scores in Indiana. They speculated that it wouldn't.

Here is the article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/...

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#186

Post by TheCoelacanth »

amorphid wrote: post #117
aerique wrote: post #84

Honest question: We lived with one car (a car that was given to us) for 4 ½ years. During that time, I walked or rode my bike to school to save on gas. We recently bought a second car with money I saved from my web design business. Is the US really structured so that owning one car is (seen as) a problem?

I just moved from San Francisco, CA to the Washington, DC area. I'm currently staying at my dad's place in Alexandria, VA. San Francisco has a very good public transit system, at least compared to any other suburb in which I've lived. In San Francisco, I could be most places I cared to be within 30 minutes. There was literally a bus station outside of my apartment window, and I could catch probably a dozen different…

DC is at least as good as San Francisco for living without a car. You're having problems because you're out in the suburbs. Move into DC proper or even to a more accessible suburb like Ballston, Clarendon, Crystal City, etc or even just move a bit closer to old town Alexandria and it's very easy to live without a car.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#187

Post by jschwartzi »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #181
rdtsc wrote: post #12

Great points. This, I think is one of the fundamental problems: --- If parents and local decision-makers really value education (and there is a small portion of the community that does), student and teacher morale would be much different. --- The overall environment matters more than the teacher. We've mentioned it here not too long ago as well. Doesn't matter how fancy the workbooks and new materials or how hard we…

> Many students come poor and/or bad families. No new "Common Core" tests are going to help that child learn if they are afraid they might not eat dinner that evening or they will be beaten up by their drunken family members. Just flogging the teacher to teach harder won't work. This sounds true if you don't think about it too hard. But why is it that kids who don't suffer get about the same (horrible) education as t…

If you want to attract someone competent to a profession, generally it has to be seen as a desirable profession. As long as teaching is seen as a last resort people wont respect it and you'll keep attracting large numbers of teachers whose only qualification was that they couldn't find a better job somewhere else.

To put it bluntly, teaching has been made into an objectively shitty profession, which is why you can't attract good teachers. If you want good teachers, you need to pay them more and give them the freedom to actually teach. There have been multiple blog posts on here about attracting good software engineers, and I believe the same principles apply to any profession:

You need to: * Pay top dollar for talent. * Allow significant autonomy.

The teacher in the article indicated that neither of these goals were met in his career, and he indicated that they likely wouldn't get met. Based on his awards, I would say he was a "top quartile teacher," so there's some evidence in this that if we had paid him more and reduced requirements imposed by the school district, then he might have stayed on. That would certainly have made things better for his students.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#188

Post by rdtsc »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #153
thinkling wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that penalizes the kids whose parents are less engaged, for whatever reason. And the less engaged parents are more likely to be the poorer parents, so you're reducing the kids' chances to escape poverty. It is effectively what happens in urban areas where richer parents send their kids to private schools and disengage from the public school system.

Yet in the poorest areas of the world kids beg for pens/pencils and paper because they can then use that to go to school. Poverty can't really be the entire reason despite the close correlation.

I the key is not poverty per se, but cultural and family attitudes toward learning. In US poverty is usually a proxy for bad attitudes toward learning. In other countries it might not be.

Poverty is also often a proxy for noxious family environment. Which doesn't have to be true. Someone from a rich family could be abused and tormented by his caretakers just as much.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#189

Post by Goronmon »

I honestly don't know how people stay teachers for more than a couple years in most places. The people who I know who are teachers not only get paid fairly poorly, they work 60-70 hour weeks, have less and less control over how they are allowed to teach and also have to deal with crazy parents (ie. parent stalking outside school, sending books/emails, because they apparently aren't teaching in a way that is pro-conservative/pro-christian).

It just seems like it takes a lot of effort to get into a field that treats you like crap almost as a general rule.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#190

Post by scott_s »

tokenadult wrote: post #163
scott_s wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other professions, when they want better candidates, they offer a better salary.

In other professions, the people who enter the professions are more rigorously trained and tested before entering the profession. But the crucial difference is that in professions with higher pay, clients have the power to shop, and clients are not compelled to consume the services of professionals employed by the government in the usual case.

I'm open to allowing teaching to be closer to a typical labor market, assuming that we also raise the pay. Although I do think that better pay will give schools better choice in choosing teachers, as competition for the available spots would probably increase.
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