Nobody wants to teach anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#111

Post by orzig » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:23 PM UTC

dwater wrote: post #73

orzig wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry to hear that, but to counter-anecdote: Four of my family members are teachers at various levels. They all have strong frustrations but money (either in terms of perception or paying the bills) has never been one.

Are any of them under 40 and completely self-supporting? Most of the coworkers I had when teaching who weren’t bothered by the money had an external source of financial support. It took me a long time to realize it because those who are supported by others don’t like to admit it. I referred to them as hobbyist teachers, and they were much much more likely to stay longer than 5 years compared to those who were doing i…

Legitimate question, thanks. Two married to each other. One over 40. Last living in a nicer part of town than otherwise due to husband, but actually looked for non-teaching jobs and couldn’t find higher salaries so stayed.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#112

Post by treis » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:23 PM UTC

dwater wrote: post #55

lr4444lr wrote: post #15

I realize this piece is more of a rant, and I won't hold it to a data accuracy standard it never pretended to have, but they pay issue is really misconstrued. Salaries in large urban districts are often well above area median, and when accounting for benefits and pension, quite impressive. In South Dakota and a number of states in the south and rural districts, yes it is another story, and it is bad. Also, teachers N…

Comparing teacher pay to the median wage isn’t an apples to apples comparison because the average teacher has between a bachelor’s degree and a master’s, a state certification with regular training and renewal requirements, and a good amount of professional experience. I was a high school teacher and when I left my salary went up by 50% on day one, passed 100% increase within 2 years, and tripled within 5 years. The…

It's pretty close to the median worker having a bachelor's degree so that doesn't really skew the comparison

Ultimately teaching salaries are fine. The median teacher makes about the median salary. But it comes with great job security, benefits, and significantly more time off than the median job. The benefits are high enough to attract enough teachers.

The problem are parents and administration. And more recently kids missed a couple years of school due to Covid and went feral. It's gotten to be a significantly worse job. Solution is to cut the bullshit. Not pay more to incentivize people to put up with the bullshit.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#113

Post by quacked » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

eric4smith wrote: post #31

Because the old way of teaching has been broken for decades now - by broken I mean not applicable to todays world. One good thing about C19 is that it forced us to re-examine how we taught and what we taught. And I think we clearly see that we are spending too many hours in classrooms with boring teachers. Looking back many years at my schooling I can see that much of it was impractical and unnecessary. Things like m…

Here, check this out:.

https://www.unschooling.com/t/the-seven-lesson-schoolteacher...

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#114

Post by throwaway787544 » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

lr4444lr wrote: post #15

I realize this piece is more of a rant, and I won't hold it to a data accuracy standard it never pretended to have, but they pay issue is really misconstrued. Salaries in large urban districts are often well above area median, and when accounting for benefits and pension, quite impressive. In South Dakota and a number of states in the south and rural districts, yes it is another story, and it is bad. Also, teachers N…

Many teachers work very long hours. Ones I've dated did a minimum of 60 hours. They would work their day shift and then go home and work more, and work on weekends, and then do tutoring for extra cash.

Do you know how frustrating and exhausting teaching is? Very. They also don't get hazard pay for working in dangerous schools. One teacher I knew literally stopped teaching and became a kind of official bouncer (I don't know what it's called); when kids would get violent his job was to restrain them. The reason he switched was the kids' disrespect and his own desire to see them improve was crushing his soul.

Many teachers use their own money to buy their students' class materials.

If you're a teacher in New Jersey, you have to also live in New Jersey, a state with a ridiculously high tax rate.

The years of service thing is a fair yardstick because it's comparing apples to apples. We are not paying them based on what a different job would pay them, we pay them based on the job we want them to do.

Benefits and pension are wildly overblown. Half of teachers don't even qualify for pension and benefits vary greatly. https://www.teacherpensions.org/blog/what-average-teacher-pe...

It's not enough money.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#115

Post by xbar » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

magicalist wrote: post #68

bradleyjg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as we have tenure and the seniority system we aren’t going to see significantly higher pay. Virtually everyone else has a boss that judges his or her performance. Sometimes those judgments are wrong or unfair. Almost every institution has determined that’s still better than nothing. But somehow not schools.

Are you claiming seniority isn't a thing in many workplaces? That's just wrong.

I claim that starting teacher salaries have nothing to do with seniority--they are the universal starting salaries for a district.

They are too low.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#116

Post by Aunche » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

seibelj wrote: post #10

People do want to teach and get paid to do it. It’s called private schools. They charge what the market will bear for their quality and location, and they pay what the market rate is for teachers of the requisite quality that let them charge the rates they need. What confuddles people in education is the same thing that causes endless articles about housing, healthcare, inflation… it’s called “basic economics”. Just…

I partially agree with you, but private school teachers often get paid less than their public school counterparts. Private schools get a flood of applications from humanities PHDs who don't have the certifications required to teach in public schools, so it's very much a race to the bottom in terms of salary. Private school's biggest advantage for teachers is that the parents treat education seriously, so they are less likely to treat teachers like babysitters.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#117

Post by borski » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

_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…

I agree with the rest of your post, but:

> Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit.

This isn’t necessarily true; sometimes the parents simply don’t have the proper info or education themselves. Example: parent of a kid with ADHD who has no understanding of what ADHD is or how it presents, and thus that their kid even has it.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#118

Post by jleyank » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

tinsmith wrote: post #43

uniqueuid wrote: post #2

As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction). Watching how large parts of the political spectrum embrace hardship as a societal teaching tool, I begin to understand that the expectation may always have been that kids ought to figur…

When you're actually from the US as a Millennial or Gen Z'er, it's not hard to see what happened. The previous two generations taught us nothing, but expected us to know everything they did, as though by virtue of being a living human this knowledge is just granted. Our parents never had the time to show us how to budget, care for a home, etc, so we had to learn from the Internet. But why? I posit that Boomers and Ge…

Did this happen because the kids didn’t listen or because the parents were overly protective or some combination of the two? Helicopter parents denied their children the chance to fail safely and so calibrate the good and bad portions of life. By scheduling their kids time and removing all risk they prevented growth.

You never did chores for your spending money? Had to help out with minor repairs or maintenance of a domicile? Never had a part time job? I suspect not, again, as the now revealed as misguided effort to give their kids the best (“better than we had it”) was crippling. It’s not hard to do what is mentioned in the first paragraph.

Look up the shit that went down in 1968 before you repeat that previous generations had it easier. There’s no draft, although the Cold War and risk of nukes are coming back. You have computer and communication resources that exceed st:tos (damn near), uni has toys that were inconceivable in the 70’s, …. Google what opscan forms and #2 pencils were - that’s years of organizing courses and drop/add.

The only thing that really sucks now is that std’s can kill.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#119

Post by aninteger » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

imglorp wrote: post #95

I'd like to introduce a sensitive subject as neutrally as possible. For root causes, the morale environment is largely politically induced in a coordinated attack on public education that goes back to the 80's. For some examples... * cuts on school lunches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable * voucher programs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_voucher * vast finanical aid cuts http://tech.mit.edu/…

Well on school lunches, California is at least trying to make things better: https://www.schoolmealsforall.org/

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#120

Post by scythe » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:24 PM UTC

This blog post touches on a lot of topics. I'm laying in bed and groggy, so I'm just going to highlight one thing:

>They’re lucky if they have air conditioning.

LKY: "Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency."

You can't think properly if you're hot. This isn't my opinion, it's measurable. E.g.

https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/ijerph/ijerph-18-07698/art...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/02656736.2017.13...

"Findings indicate that academic achievement is linked to building condition mediated by the social climate and student attendance. The model accounted for 70 percent of the variance in the outcome measures."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02724...

Teaching is complicated. Politics is complicated. Parent-school interactions are very complicated. Air conditioning, by comparison, is drop-dead simple. The inability of school districts to do the simplest and most obvious thing to address the problem underscores the degree to which meaningful information is driven out of the education dialogue by pet-issue squabbling.