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Nobody wants to teach anymore

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Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#201

Post by lotsofpulp »

treis wrote: post #187
lotsofpulp wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I know 3 public school teachers, in CA/NYC/NJ. Their 6 to 8 weeks off in the summer (if that, due to ongoing training), is nowhere near enough to offset the low pay per hour and most importantly, having to deal with garbage pare…

Average teacher salary in California is $84,000. Official working days total out to about 12 weeks of vacation. Realistically less than that but still much more than your typical worker.

Why are they being compared to typical workers?

The question of if teachers are sufficiently paid is answered by asking if current classroom sizes are sufficiently small and staffed by sufficient quality teachers. Whatever price that makes that happen is the appropriate price, regardless of what people in other jobs are earning.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#202

Post by d_e_solomon »

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 disagree. Private schools self select their student population. Most private schools do not take students with special needs or students with really difficult home lives - and those students deserve education. Once private schools have to accept every student regardless of need, will their quality remain? I doubt it.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#203

Post by bushbaba »

tlogan wrote: post #63

And teachers here in San Francisco refused to teach for one full year. I do not blame them: it is really a crappy job. And as result of that only very bad are still teaching: the ones that hate the job, hate the kids and, in general, not nice people. I think the only way we can sole this is the following: - clamp down on union: it should easier to fire bad teachers - class size should be less than 10. Expensive yeah…

Class size should be less than ten for disruptive students.

In California the other problem is that 10%+ of the students are ESL. With a large undocumented immigrant impact to school resources.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#204

Post by _vdpp »

trident5000 wrote: post #171
_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…

Controversial opinion here (maybe?) but I think the purge of men from education has had a real impact on child behavior and learning. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/02/the-ex... "...men continued to make up most of the high-school teaching force until the late 1970s" Humans are still largely primal and male presence tends to instill respect and behavior changes in younger people; I suspect the abs…

In that time I think we see a pretty big decline in the ratio of boys:girls graduating college too, no?

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#205

Post by chiefalchemist »

> Almost nobody respects teachers.

> They think schools exist in order to warehouse children while their parents do the real work,

Full disclosure: I'm not a teacher.

Three thoughts:

1) I wish I had $20 for everytime I've seen a social media meme along the lines of "kids should be taught _____ in school. Like/share if you agree" and 90% of the time it's something parents can and should be doing at home.

2) Ironically, anecdotally, it seems it's "too busy for their kids" parents who insist on outsourcing more and more to school systems. Some of this seems cultural (i.e., that belief has become normalized) but it also exist in the context of systemic issues (e.g., wages continue to lose ground to inflation...everyone needs to own more than they can afford).

3) The last couple of years there has been a lot of chatter about "threats to our democracy" imho most of it misguided hyperbolic media narrative. On the other hand, The Fourth Estate has erroded to become a toothless stuff animal. That's a legit threat. All that's needed now are less educated less thought-able masses.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#206

Post by throw0101a »

diognesofsinope wrote: post #167
_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. 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? Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans. > 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others. Yeah, but cost is the same and cost is what's important. > 4. Many school problems are caused by disrup…

> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans.

Counter-points to that:

You still have to pay the bills before retirement.

And this even assumes they get a good pensions, because a lot of states don't bother funding their public employee pensions properly (using current-year tax income for splashy announcements instead, kicking the liability down the road for the next politician):

* https://vtdigger.org/2021/01/17/painful-cuts-proposed-in-pen...

In various Canadian provinces teachers get decent salaries and good pensions: why can't US states do the same?

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#207

Post by eigenhombre »

aetherson wrote: post #162
throwaway787544 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

How old were the ones you dated? In general, the hours spent teaching diminish over time. At the beginning of a teacher's career, they spend a lot of time outside of class building lesson plans and creating tests and homework assignments. These legitimately take a lot of time. And they aren't perfect, so the teacher often sees that they need to make big changes after those lesson plans and tests and homework assignme…

I know three teachers well (Chicago area; two quite senior, the other recently retired). Hours might have once diminished over time as you suggest, but their experience as told to me contradicts this trend: curricula have been changing so quickly in response to administrative decree that every few years everything gets thrown out and rebuilt. When you add to that decreasing resources for classrooms and increasing student-to-teacher ratios, it is not surprising to me that they work more hours than anybody else I know.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#208

Post by nyokodo »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #35
GiorgioG wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"K-12 schools spend $666.9 billion or $13,185 per pupil annually." - https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti... We invest plenty. We just don't get a great return on our investment.

I don’t think it’s fair to assume the money is evenly split. Public schooling must also support students who need much more support, ranging from ESL to a variety of disabilities with a variety of severity. If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous. 13k is an alarmingly low amount of support for dyslexia, or autism, or diabetes.

> If you think of specialized needs students the 13k number looks ridiculous.

You’re comparing an average per student spend to a high needs minority. Average spend should be compared to the average student who does not have dyslexia etc. A larger than average portion will be spent on kids with special needs due to special facilities, smaller class sizes, and specialist teachers etc.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#209

Post by bee_rider »

randomdata wrote: post #151
candiddevmike wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1) Has it really? I'm sure the potential exists for video lectures or whatever, but I think the teachers still ostensibly at least teach.

2) How little do you pay babysitters? At, say, $5 per kid per hour, a teacher of 20 would be doing pretty well, and that's on the low side of class sizes these days I think.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#210

Post by trident5000 »

_vdpp wrote: post #204
trident5000 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controversial opinion here (maybe?) but I think the purge of men from education has had a real impact on child behavior and learning. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/02/the-ex... "...men continued to make up most of the high-school teaching force until the late 1970s" Humans are still largely primal and male presence tends to instill respect and behavior changes in younger people; I suspect the abs…

In that time I think we see a pretty big decline in the ratio of boys:girls graduating college too, no?

I think this is absolutely part of what causes the phenomenon. Broadly speaking boys need male mentorship.
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