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The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

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Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#231

Post by scott_s »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #210
jschwartzi wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you want to attract someone competent to a profession, generally it has to be seen as a desirable profession. This is flawed logic. You're selecting for status-seeking personalities, not competence. > 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. This is fla…

"Desirable" is not synonymous with "high status". It just means something someone would want to do. Plenty of competent people may look at teaching and decide the work and effort is not worth the pay.

Your arguments again higher pay can be used for any profession - which is a good indication that the reasoning is flawed. If that is true for teacher pay, then why not engineers, software developers, doctors, lawyers, etc?

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#232

Post by steve_b »

iguanayou wrote: post #224

I taught high school for 5 years and made the same decision. The biggest factor for me was how the schools were being administered; just a few examples: - Competition among students, instead of being used as a motivator as piles of research suggests, was specifically DISALLOWED because it might make certain students feel bad. - When a student fell behind because they were slacking off in class, it was the teacher's r…

What, in your opinion, is the best research/study showing the benefit of competition in a high school classroom? Most of what I'm finding online are essentially opinion pieces.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#233

Post by JediWing »

tokenadult wrote: post #176
waynemr wrote: post #9

The sad and infuriating thing is that good teachers leaving public service is precisely what conservative groups strive for, in their "starve the beast" agendas. As more quality staff leave, they [conservative groups] can claim greater and greater failures in the public system and siphon more tax dollars into private voucher schools.

The sad and infuriating thing is that good teachers leaving public service is precisely what conservative groups strive for I challenge you directly to find any example of a conservative person saying that they want good teachers to leave public service. Most voters and taxpayers who have considered the issue want bad teachers to leave the public payroll, to make more room for good teachers. Young people from poor fa…

You expect them to come out and say it? How quaint.

Private corporations want government sponsored private education. For example, (thankfully ex) governor of Pennsylvania has made aggressive funding cuts to traditional public education, and he was heavily funded by private schools, to the point where his radio appearances on the local talk network were sponsored by "PA cyber charter school".

On top of that, traditional public schools are union, and the political leanings of unions are well known.

Defunding and destroying non private schools is an obvious goal of the conservative movement.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#234

Post by mapt »

WoodenChair wrote: post #88
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?

Yes, the U.S. is a giant country geographically and many areas have poor public transportation as a result of how spread out it is. Virginia is a fairly rural state.

The US being a giant country has very little to do with the US being mostly car-dependent for the activities of everyday life. We built most of our settlements on the inexpensive outskirts of existing settlements, with free roads and cheap (and secure, as the world's greatest oil producer at the time) oil. We saw such development as 'business' & 'industry' rather than 'planning', and largely consigned design elements to private developers, with the asterisk that we would pay for whatever roads and utilities they needed - including an interstate highway system that was practically a wonder of the world at the time. Strong tax inducements on depreciation of commercial property, and ownership of a single-family home, resulted in an ever-growing sprawl. We actually tore up most of the public transportation that existed in the early 20th century, and the economic vacuum of urban decay accelerated itself with racial tension that much of the rest of the world does not have.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#235

Post by akshatpradhan »

king_jester wrote: post #223
akshatpradhan wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fig…

This is disingenuous. Medical schools would increase resident caps even without the bonus money from Medicare if there was a reason to do so. Reasons go beyond just the Medicare funds that go for those slots.

Could you articulate more? Why aren't Academic Hospitals allowed to increase the cap limit on Residency programs?

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#236

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

scott_s wrote: post #231
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to attract someone competent to a profession, generally it has to be seen as a desirable profession. This is flawed logic. You're selecting for status-seeking personalities, not competence. > 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. This is fla…

"Desirable" is not synonymous with "high status". It just means something someone would want to do. Plenty of competent people may look at teaching and decide the work and effort is not worth the pay. Your arguments again higher pay can be used for any profession - which is a good indication that the reasoning is flawed. If that is true for teacher pay, then why not engineers, software developers, doctors, lawyers, e…

> "Desirable" is not synonymous with "high status".

Not in the sense that it means the highest level of status.

It is in the sense that it means "some (arbitrary) mid level of status". This is exactly what it means.

We're not talking about physical comfort while working. It's not labor, it's indoor/office, with air conditioning.

> Your arguments again higher pay can be used for any profession

Yes, and they're correct for those as well. It explains quite a bit of HR buffoonery.

> which is a good indication that the reasoning is flawed.

But if you're doing meta-analysis to try to determine if my logic is flawed, it means you don't understand the logic itself. But that goes without saying.

> If that is true for teacher pay, then why not engineers, software developers, doctors, lawyers, etc?

Engineers: Supply more closely meets demand.

Doctors: Supply doesn't meet demand, but there are so many other obstacles and inefficiencies no one can tell. Besides, dumbasses can't claim doctors should be paid more so that we'll get more doctors... supply is restricted by AMA and medical schools which limit the number of seats.

Lawyers: Supply of good lawyers meets demand, oversupply is something they write editorial cartoons about constantly.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#237

Post by scentoni »

jdoenejdk wrote: post #145
analog31 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them." -- Jerry Falwell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Falwell

And how many US elected Republicans in Congress share those views?

Depends on whether you're talking about party primaries or general elections. An example of this phenomenon wrt a different topic http://www.vox.com/2015/1/5/7494179/immigration-republican-p...

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#238

Post by [deleted] »

shiro wrote: post #100
mirkules wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not uncommon to commute 30 miles or more to work (one way) in Los Angeles, for example. My commute used to be 62 miles each way, then I cut it to 45 miles, and now it's about 10 miles. There is no effective public transportation system that could take me to/from work faster than even driving in rush hour traffic could. So at least in LA, it is definitely a big problem to not have independent cars. Edit: I shoul…

30 miles one way doesn't sound uncommon in Tokyo as well, though the extensive public transportation system makes the need of cars much less than US. So I think it also depends on the policy of city design. I guess it's harder to omit cars for the rural parts of US rather than cities. (I lived in LA about a year without car. It's ok if you're single, but if you have family it's a totally different story.)

[deleted]

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#239

Post by beachstartup »

mirkules wrote: post #96
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?

It is not uncommon to commute 30 miles or more to work (one way) in Los Angeles, for example. My commute used to be 62 miles each way, then I cut it to 45 miles, and now it's about 10 miles. There is no effective public transportation system that could take me to/from work faster than even driving in rush hour traffic could. So at least in LA, it is definitely a big problem to not have independent cars. Edit: I shoul…

LA is all about the neighborhood you live in. LA neighborhoods are basically self-contained cities. if you choose the right one, you don't need a car. e.g.: santa monica, venice, west hollywood, downtown, silverlake, dt culver city, dt pasadena, etc, etc, etc. these are dense urban areas with top notch city housing within walking distance (10 minutes) of everything. it's city-expensive but not like NY or SF (with exceptions, like santa monica).

most people in LA commute clear across the entire county, which is why they need a car. most of these people are middle class, they could move if they wanted to, but they don't want to.

today, with uber and other services, the only reason you would "need" a car in LA is to commute, unless you make terrible living choices. also the expo line (downtown-west side light rail) will be done in a year.

Re: The Tough Decision to Leave the Classroom

#240

Post by coryrc »

mullingitover wrote: post #80
brandonmenc wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a disgrace that our college-educated professional teachers are so under-valued they have to take on multiple side-jobs just to maintain their economic status quo. If you dig around the author's Google+ account, his wife appears not to work. I'm not casting stones re: single worker households - particularly if they're living within their means - but an American household wanting to do more than just scrape by r…

The two-income household is sort of the 'betray' option in prisoner's dilemma. If nobody did it, labor would be vastly more valuable, and nobody would need two incomes to support a family (generally). Kids get a full-time parent, nobody has to depend on day care, it's an awesome deal for families. However, as soon as the critical mass of people starts depending on the extra income stream, the value of the labor drops…

Yeah, because no one can create wealth, especially not women...
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