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Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

adamcadre.ac

271–280 of 764 posts

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids don't need to be vaccinated. Adults who are concerned about it, including teachers, should be. Keeping schools closed because children aren't vaccinated is irrational.

What the heck are you talking about? Brazil variant for example is pretty brutal on kids, death is not so uncommon result. School is one of the worst places for spreading, since tons of kids lack will/discipline to behave consistently, and are cramped in various classes. Once 1 member of household is sick, the chance rest will get it is pretty high. Remote teaching sucks for many reasons for kids and should be used o…

The CDC disagrees with you: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

> Although children can be infected with SARS-CoV-2, can get sick from COVID-19, and can spread the virus to others, less than 10% of COVID-19 cases in the United States have been among children and adolescents aged 5–17 years (COVID Data Tracker). Compared with adults, children and adolescents who have COVID-19 are more commonly asymptomatic (never develop symptoms) or have mild, non-specific symptoms.

> Some studies have found that it is possible for communities to reduce incidence of COVID-19 while keeping schools open for in-person instruction.

> Evidence suggests that staff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students to staff, staff to student, or student to student.

> A study comparing county-level COVID-19 hospitalizations between counties with in-person learning and those without in-person learning found no effect of in-person school reopening on COVID-19 hospitalization rates when baseline hospitalization rates were low or moderate.

SF has some of the lowest infection rates in the country. So there is no scientific reason to keep schools closed when you see the harm it is causing disadvantaged families.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#272
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, public school in the United States is broken. They're quite functional in the majority of the OECD. If you are a parent and are in SF this should be a wake up call. The city is rapidly failing, it's in your best interest to get out now.

> They're quite functional in the majority of the OECD. Functional isn't what should be aimed for: excellent should be the mark. Right now, the majority still forces their students into thought boxes (e.g if you fail maths at school, you're supposedly balls at engineering for the rest of your life), pretends that spending 12 years memorizing facts is the pinnacle of education, employs unmotivated teachers with below-…

> Exams we still about memorizing with no focus on understanding

This was the biggest part that got me. I thought university was a place to actually learn things.

It turned out that it's a place for you to rote learn all the required material without any understanding. I saw it firsthand with my friends, who only knew how to follow the steps they'd been taught to solve problems.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is heartbreaking when all a child has is public school. All I had was public school in a small town and I was a National Merit Scholar. I don’t understand this line of reasoning that you need more teaching from parents or for profit tutoring etc. I got a great education at my public school. Now are some schools not great? Yes. But a blanket statement that all public schools aren’t enough seems incorrect, in my e…

“In a small town” basically covers it right there.

That's not particularly descriptive, because the high school in my small town of 25,000 was in the middle of the LA metro area. It is most often referred to as a small town by LA locals but it's high school class alone is easily the size of a "small town" in rural areas, where you might need a car just to get to your nearest neighbor.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That trope needs to die. California's schools are not underfunded. California spends a record amount on education[0], over $18k per child. "Reflecting the changes to Proposition 98 funding levels noted above, total K-12 per-pupil expenditures from all sources are projected to be $18,837 in 2020-21 and $18,000 in 2021-22—the highest levels ever (K-12 Education Spending Per Pupil). The decrease between 2020-21 and 2021…

> over $18k per child Lol what? What on earth do they do with that money? You could hire a private tutor per four children for that money and have them do it in the children's homes. Would end up as a private tutor half-time for two-child families, with them doing homework the other half-time. If you had four children it'd be full-time!

Pensions, administration, and buildings eat a lot of the budget. And they continue to grow.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That trope needs to die. California's schools are not underfunded. California spends a record amount on education[0], over $18k per child. "Reflecting the changes to Proposition 98 funding levels noted above, total K-12 per-pupil expenditures from all sources are projected to be $18,837 in 2020-21 and $18,000 in 2021-22—the highest levels ever (K-12 Education Spending Per Pupil). The decrease between 2020-21 and 2021…

As a nation, US inflation adjusted, per-student K-12 spending has tripled since the 1960s.

I suspect per-teacher salaries haven’t tripled in that time however!

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason my comment was downvoted. Does the system portrayed sound like one that is using resources efficiently to do important things? In some respects the school may doing harm, teaching students that they can be late and miss assignments without consequences. In the private sector they would be fired.

Public schools work well throughout the majority of the developed world - the US seems to be a notable exception. Anand Giridharadas addresses this in his infamous google-talk quite nicely I think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_zt3kGW1NM&t=623s (I'm linking this talk on HN way too often, but it just seems perfectly fitting so very often)

That depends what you mean by "well".

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#277
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because standards would hinder "equity" in educational outcomes. The SF Board of Education recently voted to end selective admissions for Lowell High School in favour of a lottery, citing lack of diversity and "pervasive systemic racism". The board positions are elected so these sorts of policies are presumably what the people of San Francisco want.

There is an effort underway to recall members of the SFBOE: https://www.recallsfschoolboard.org/ There is a father who has been out every weekend collection collecting petitions. On one occasion, someone tried to thwart the attempt by stealing some of the petitions. Even though there is clear video evidence and the public has identified the man, the police haven't arrested him, and SF politicians have not even mentio…

Cyan “Recall Chesa Boudin” Bannister is a very bored billionaire housewife.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#278
post #218
post #172

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> You're tearing down a straw man friend, I didn't say anything about tutoring or homeschooling. No straw man involved. I don’t think you’ve thought through the implications of ‘getting rid of private school’. The point is that to ban private schools you’d also have to ban homeschooling.

It’s my understanding that private schools play a minor role in other countries. Those same countries also have home schools. I don’t quite understand how restricting a private school of several hundred students affects a parent teaching their children at home. Clearly rules could be in place to separate those concerns apart.

> It’s my understanding that private schools play a minor role in other countries.

Huh my understanding is the opposite!

Almost everyone in the US seems to go to public school. Nobody seems to talk about where they went to school - they just went to where was by their home. For example this list of privileged people at Beverly Hills High School is extraordinary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Hills_High_School#Nota...

The US public school system seems to be doing extraordinarily well here - in almost every other country these rich people would have been in a private school wouldn't they? The US system seems unusually egalitarian.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#279
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another approach could be: High school should be completely optional. Those who want to go will benefit from it and those who don’t won’t be there to make trouble. Move the high school teachers to middle school and elementary for smaller classes.

A lack of education is one of the most pressing issues in western democracies. Reducing that doesn't look like a good idea to me.

I agree with you but we need to re-think education. The current education system is not working in general. Class rooms are over crowded and not enough teachers.

A pre-recorded video you can pause and rewind would be more beneficial than being corralled into an overcrowded stale box and expected to learn.

Re: Life as a public school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2021

#280
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of school is not to produce geniuses, but to take a mass of illiterates and turn them into semi-literate persons, also giving them time to mature as human beings before they are allowed into university or work. If an 18 year old person can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require their fellow countrymen to use subtitles,…

> can read, write, use basic math operations, know a few facts about the country they live in and speak in a way that doesn't require his fellow countrymen to use subtitles This seems achievable by the 8th grade.

Most people never retain much of anything past that anyway, in my experience. I’d guesstimate that fewer than 20% of undergraduate school graduates are actually well educated in any meaningful sense of the term.
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