471–480 of 1001 posts
Former HS math teacher here. It was the hardest job I’ve ever had. I still have nightmares about being back in the classroom 18 years later. I was easily working 12+ hours a day doing class planning, grading, etc. not to mention the actual teaching. Returning to programming my pay doubled and my stress level dropped profoundly. Teacher pay should easily be double what it is. (And about that summers off—with the excep…
The US has always experienced relentless political activism against public education. This creates a climate where teachers, and the institution they work in, are actively hated by a wide swath of the public. This is due in no small part to proponents of religious education. It's true that teachers receive an above-average salary, but that can be both a blessing and a curse. The curse is that your wages are a matter…
> The US has always experienced relentless political activism against public education. Lol we spend almost 3x more on k-12 public education now (inflation adjusted) than we did in 1960. I really doubt the relentless political activism was on the side against public education. Really, the cost to educate a child should have gone down substantially relative to inflation given new technologies that make teaching easier…
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…
There are over 8 million people employed in primary and secondary education, which is about 5% of the workforce. Public spending on primary and secondary education is 3.2% of GDP and private spending is 0.3%. By the latest numbers, that's about $800 billion/year. If we assume that 2/3 of the costs are personnel and 1/3 are facilities and other expenses, that leaves just $65k for the wages and benefits of the average employee.
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> teachers work more in 9 months than most professionals I want to understand this more and think we need to measure this well. As a software dev, I’ve always struggled with measuring the amount of work performed and usually disregard measures of intellectual output as misleading measures (eg, lines of code, story points completed, whatever). What makes you think teachers work more in 9 months than a typical professi…
Teachers are changing professions, in large numbers, and have been for a while. TFA discusses that and how districts are resorting to desperate measures to get bodies to teach, like drafting in college kids, cutting school hours, and importing them. You don’t have one student. You have easily dozens, maybe hundreds. There isn’t enough time to actively teach, and grade all their stuff, and figure out the next lesson p…
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> 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 school rather than “thank you”? Well many students hated school, it is what it is. If you get beat up on a daily basis or are bored out of your mind (because let's face it, most of the material IS boring) I don't see why you should feel obligated to thank yo…
I agree that there are reasons someone would hate school, but it doesn't make sense for it to be a cultural norm to say that to teachers. No one ever says "wow you murder people for Uncle Sam for money?" to someone who was in the military, they say "thank you for your service". I think that's what the author was getting at. It's not just low pay; teaching is thankless, even looked down upon.
Former HS math teacher here. It was the hardest job I’ve ever had. I still have nightmares about being back in the classroom 18 years later. I was easily working 12+ hours a day doing class planning, grading, etc. not to mention the actual teaching. Returning to programming my pay doubled and my stress level dropped profoundly. Teacher pay should easily be double what it is. (And about that summers off—with the excep…
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This is true in almost every country. Education is a money pit.
> Education is a money pit. How exactly do you mean this? The U.S. spent $90.5 billion for "Elementary, Secondary, and Vocational Education" in 2021* (a subset of "Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services"), which is 1.3% of $6.82 trillion in total 2021 government expenditures. Compare to $696.5B for Medicare, $754.8B for National Defense, etc. If anything, this illustrates how relatively unimportant a ba…
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> 2. It seems that education degrees are seen as easier to achieve than others. Here is the problem. Teachers in America compare themselves to professionals, but their test scores are below the average for college educated people generally: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/... . Now 40% of college graduates don’t even get a job that requires a college degree. Disproportionately, those are p…
I'm sure that (1) anyone can come up with counter-anecdotes, and (2) there are different kinds of intelligence, and most of us couldn't begin to cope with a class full of kids. That said: practically every college student knows that the Education majors are the dumbest people on campus.