Nobody wants to teach anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#151

Post by randomdata » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:35 PM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #121

_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…

1. Parasitic administration salaries 2. Depending on the state you may not even need one 3. It's the parents, not the kids that make them feel this way. Kids typically love their teachers 4. 100% 5. Building a new school is 10-100s of millions typically. Why it costs so much is worthy of debate, but plunking down new schools these days is far more costly than in the past.

1. Automation. Teaching in its rawest form has been automated away, leaving it to be a valueless human endeavour. “Teaching” in the context of children survives because it has become a childcare service. But babysitting is not able to charge much as its cost must remain under the income potential of parents, else parents will take the responsibility themselves.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#152

Post by _vdpp » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:35 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…

There are some very good public schools out there too - but you’re going to pay tuition in the form of housing costs in expensive neighborhoods.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#153

Post by jaybrendansmith » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:35 PM UTC

sul_tasto wrote: post #71

zmgsabst wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we need to admit managerialism fails at knowledge fields — perhaps Taylorism entirely. I’m not sure what’s better, though.

I wholeheartedly agree. I think a critical examination of the MBA degree, and the values it embodies, is long overdue.

Any MBA or Product Manager telling a security expert what's important and what's not is absolutely doing it wrong. What they teach in an MBA is simply the larger picture of a business, it's complex systems, it's architecture. Anyone that writes code should be fairly good at it because it's essentially the same thing one does as an engineer: Determine the interfaces and contracts between the teams, understand the 'organs of the body' and the processes therein, understand the inputs and the outputs and governing systems such as cash flow and income. What often happens is prioritization and risk assessment ... the needs of the customers are many and there is only so much room in the backlog. What the security expert needs to do is to make the risks clear to the manager in business terms that they can understand, which to be honest, often comes down to probable loss of money, or customers, or brand.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#154

Post by spaceman_2020 » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:36 PM UTC

As the husband of a college teacher who has been perpetually on the tenure track, it really is true that they’re not paid enough. My wife has put in more hours than anyone I know, is more qualified than almost everyone I know. And yet I made way more than her in a single year than she did in a decade because I happened to venture into a field VCs love (and which has zero positive impact on society - web3).

Its cruel and a gross symptom late stage capitalism and its completely misaligned capital allocation.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#155

Post by prirun » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:36 PM UTC

I know a few teachers who have quit or want to quit. It isn't a money issue, at least for them.

My high-school computer science teacher (many moons ago) taught advanced high-school math. He quit because the administrative requirements became too burdensome. He loved teaching, but every year the administrivia got worse until he finally quit.

Another teacher was a special-ed reading instructor; that's what she was trained for. But the school lost their funding for her category, so they made her a kindergarten teacher. As if that wasn't bad enough, the principal scheduled so many meetings that the teachers effectively lost their planning period and had to do that at home. Parents had direct access to teachers via email, and parents' complaints had to be addressed by the teachers every day - also outside of school hours.

Another teacher was in a poorer school district (elementary) and quit because the teaching environment was just too difficult.

More money won't fix any of these problems.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#156

Post by hattmall » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:36 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…

1. Curriculum. Instructional tools and all the things that for profit publishers can convince politicians, bureaucrats, and administrators they need.

2. They are, and there is a useless but direct correlation to pay and degree attainment. Having more degrees will get you more money, but rarely has any correlation to the quality of teacher.

3. As in most industries where the customer isn't the payer compensation does not correlate to performance. The worst teachers make the same as the best, or more if they have the degrees.

4. Equality, no child left behind and related concepts dictate that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Any efforts at exclusion are met with resistance, typically by unaffected / uninvolved parties.

5. The idea here is that consolidation of services will save money. The trend away from neighborhood schools to mega-schools / school complexes looks good from a burecratic view.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#157

Post by lotsofpulp » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:36 PM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #121

_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…

1. Parasitic administration salaries 2. Depending on the state you may not even need one 3. It's the parents, not the kids that make them feel this way. Kids typically love their teachers 4. 100% 5. Building a new school is 10-100s of millions typically. Why it costs so much is worthy of debate, but plunking down new schools these days is far more costly than in the past.

Anything to do with the general public costs a lot because of legal liability, especially when dealing with kids.

Any loss that occurs, no matter how low probability it is, get litigated and once litigated gets incorporated into expected losses by insurance companies and mitigations for it get stipulated into the insurance coverage.

Fire, handicap accessibilities, school shootings, tornado, earthquake, trip and falls, sports equipment injury, etc.

If an entity does not cover its ass head to toe on “known” risks, and lets a loss happen due to negligence, then it is on them. The response to this is lots of protocols and code requirements, and lots of additional bureaucracy to continuously check if those protocols and code requirements are being followed.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#158

Post by mattkrause » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

hotpotamus wrote: post #28

kevingadd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what standard is that actually "plenty"? Is that $13185 enough to properly fund all the services a child needs for a proper education? And if it's not, why not? How much do you believe we should be spending per student? You can point at a big number and say 'that's enough' but we spend large amounts of money on all sorts of things, the number being large doesn't mean it's sufficient. There are tons of children in…

I mean, if you have a class of 20 students (which seems on the smaller end), that would be a "revenue" of over a quarter million per teacher, right? I feel like we should be able to do a pretty good job with that while paying a teacher a decent salary.

Not really.

That class of twenty needs a building to take place, which in turn needs upkeep. It needs supplies and equipment (workbooks, computers, dodgeballs), and it needs some level of administration[0]. The teachers presumably want benefits too.

At a university, the “overhead” costs of research [1] are on the order of 50%: doing $100k worth of research require another $50k to keep the lights on, the building clean, and the library stocked. A fully-loaded salary with benefits is also about 30-50 percent higher than the take-home amount. Similar math gets you to about $100k, which would be a massive improvement but nowhere near the quarter-mil you might expect.

However, the average also hides the fact that student spending usually isn’t uniform: it’s not the case that each student costs $13k; it might be more like 9k for 19/20 students and a lot more for the one student with special needs (who might require a FTE on their own). This doesn’t scale nearly as well, but it’s important if you want to give everyone a fair shot at success.

[0] The right amount of admin is obviously debatable, but you clearly need some level of management and organization: somebody needs to make class schedules, run payroll, etc.

[1] These rates are negotiated with the federal government, and so theoretically reflect the actual costs pretty well. It’s not obvious how well they translate to a K-12 environment: researchers need more specialized services…but also are a lot less likely to draw on the walls.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#159

Post by svnpenn » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

SamuelAdams wrote: post #22

> Demoralization is what happens when you spend years becoming an expert in a subject area, and nobody cares. They’d rather hire another MBA to make all the important decisions, while they stick us on committees writing reports for ghosts. That’s when teachers start to withdraw from their jobs, when we realize it doesn’t matter what we think, and it definitely doesn’t matter how amazing we are at what we do. This was…

> it only adds complexity, or worse yet users simply don’t use the more secure features of an application.

This is true, on both counts. Adding top end security does add complexity. The business should decide if it's worth it. And users generally want whatever is simpler, and will only use MFA if it's forced upon them.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#160

Post by makeitdouble » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 1:38 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #7

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #3

Teaching/training is quite difficult. I've done quite a bit of training (but not true teaching -there's a difference), over the years. My family is full of teachers. I have many friends that are teachers. It's amazing how "solutions" never seem to actually get around to simply paying teachers more, and maybe not expecting them to be child-rearers, in lieu of parents.

paying teachers more is not going to solve the problem that most people do not appreciate teachers whether its kids or parents. It is certainly not a job for those who cannot stand being criticized the whole time.

No single thing will solve all the problems.

But money is at least a big factor: even those who keep up with self-motivation and co-worker’s appreciation can’t go on if money isn’t there. Paying them fairer prices is the first step in any attempt to make teachers come back.