Nobody wants to teach anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#531

Post by Cupertino95014 » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

notch656a wrote: post #517

varjag wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The society used to care a lot less about special needs people.

There's a finite amount of tax money available, so disproportionately allotment to a few special children effectively robs the other children of resources.

Number that would be interesting to have:

In Finland and Singapore (two countries with education systems among the top in the world):

1) What's the percentage of education spending that goes to special ed?

Looking at Finland, we can find their total spending:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/538122/general-governmen...

and we can find ample evidence that they care just as much about special needs kids as the US does, if not more:

https://www.heischools.com/blog/finlands-approach-to-special...

What I'm having a harder time finding is: what percent of the education budget goes to special ed?

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#532

Post by jedberg » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

dionidium wrote: post #527

jedberg wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the engineer who thinks everything can be solved with software. To automate grading you first must create a general AI, because if you just do multiple choice exams, you aren't really testing or measuring someone's ability to perform the task, you're just measuring their ability to make a good guess. And some teachers do that. But not the good ones. As for planning, some senior teachers have filing cabinets label…

> But any good teacher will realize that they have to customize the learning to that year's kids, and constantly update with new teaching methodologies, new information, etc. I mean this seriously: why? High school math is not a rapidly changing field. Sure, you might have to slow down or speed up, depending on the class -- although, is even that true? Is the average student really changing all that much from year to…

> High school math is not a rapidly changing field

Are you sure? Here is a list of 16,000+ papers written about teaching high school math since 2018: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2018&q=pedagogy+up...

Also, as a teacher, you have to adopt the district standards, which change every few years. Certain areas are removed, others added, some things are more important, some less. Those standards are changing to meet new standardized testing requirements.

There is a lot of change happening. Just like in programming. People who learned Cobol still need to learn new languages once in a while, because things change, even though the principles stay the same. It's the same data structures, same algorithms, but yet software engineering is rapidly changing.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#533

Post by cool_dude85 » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 7:01 PM UTC

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.

Pensions are cheap. I have a much better pension plan than the teachers in my state and the long term cost is about 16% of payroll - 8% from my employer and 8% from me. Hardly unreasonable cost, and yet I'll be able to comfortably retire around 55 and never worry about money again. That's not insignificant but it's not what is causing public schools to be underfunded.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#534

Post by dionidium » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 7:01 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #526

zdragnar wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're married and your partner continues to work and covers benefits for you. My aunt did exactly above, and felt it was a moral duty to let new younger teachers have the spot (nevermind it meant that she was going to draw a pension from the system for more years than she'd actually worked). Plenty of other teachers feel the same way, though obviously not all.

Sure, if you're married and have a second income, then that second income is basically subsidizing education. My wife was a teacher and retired when our kid was born, because we could. Some time in her 50s she'll be able to draw her pension. But basically the only reason we can afford to live in the Silicon Valley is because I'm an engineer with a decent salary. A lot of her paycheck went right back into her classroo…

> But basically the only reason we can afford to live in the Silicon Valley is because I'm an engineer with a decent salary

The existence of California -- and San Francisco, in particular -- makes discussions like this one difficult, because yes, sure, San Francisco is too weird to exist and is therefore basically irrelevant in national policy discussions.

I live in Rhode Island. East Coast. An hour from Boston. Expensive real estate, high-COL (top 10 or 15, depending on which numbers you trust), etc, etc -- and yet, we are just absolutely nothing at all like California, which is its own very weird outlier that has nothing to do with the experiences of the almost 300 million Americans who aren't Californians.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#535

Post by draebek » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 7:01 PM UTC

jschveibinz wrote: post #365

I am an early-retired EE and I thought that I could have a second career in teaching HS physics. I got the MA Teaching in Maryland, and did my one year student teaching assignment. My thoughts: 1. The degree program was decent, although a certificate program would be better for prior professionals if the law allowed it (lower cost, too much wasted time in redundant classes). 2. Teachers are sad. Very sad. They are un…

The emphasis on "classroom control" personally doesn't surprise me. If two or three students start refusing a teacher's orders, that teacher is done for the year, and maybe forever at that school. In my middle school, discipline was all but lost in most of my classes. Play cards in class, tell the teacher to shut up. What's she going to do? We stole her phone and keys in first period, locked the doors to the room, and we disconnected the intercom weeks ago.

You can send an administrator or a police officer to sit in the class, but are they going to sit there all day, every day, until the end of the year? Are they going to do that in all twenty classes that need the treatment? The second they get called away because someone set another fire in the woods, it's game on in the classroom.

At least we almost never actually assaulted staff. Someone I grew up with became a teacher and quit after just a few years. She had a student actually beat her up.

I regret a lot about my behavior in school, and reflecting on that has led me wonder why so many students hate being in school so much, and how—if?—we could educate children without making them resent the activity.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#536

Post by Cupertino95014 » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 7:02 PM UTC

notch656a wrote: post #509

treeman79 wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wife often gets kids who need to be in special Ed. Takes a few weeks or more. Basically most of her time is spent dealing with the one kid. Or the aftermath. Not fun calling parents telling them that Susan is bleeding from a thrown chair. Of John was assaulted in the bathroom. Lots of time spent chasing kid when he runs away. Never mind her own wounds. These are kindergartners. This year She’s currently has 2 full ti…

That and the special ed kids get a high allotment of cash vs regular student. In effect, the normal kid is robbed by the special ed kid who gets disproportional budget per capita. A lot of time and talk gets spent about equity between poor and rich kids, or white and black kids, but you rarely see talk of normalizing the spending differential between special and gen pop.

Somehow, in the US government it's only "benefits" that are considered. "Cost" never is.

As I said elsewhere, I defy anyone to claim that Finland doesn't care about kids' special needs. They have the best education in the world. What percent do they spend on it?

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#537

Post by pclmulqdq » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 7:03 PM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #488

meetingthrower wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re #1) I was a school board member and did exhaustive analysis of our budget. For primary education through high school, admin is NOT the root cause. If you take any school budget, and strip away everything that is not an actual classroom teacher, you will find that ~1/3 or less goes to "frontline" teaching costs. Another 1/3 goes to special ed and all that is attendant with that. I mean, my district BOUGHT a car and…

You say that like we’re overspending on spending ed. I don’t understand that position. Of course they require more resources than the average student - they’re special cases, literally! To take that away would be devastating for society’s most vulnerable, as most parents aren’t equipped with the skills or resources to be able to do any different with their children. Some cases are extreme. Should we just let them eit…

I do think that the special ed model is completely broken. I think public schools overspend on special ed, and a lot of that funding is about getting special ed kids into the same classrooms as other kids and reducing the disruptions that they cause.

Instead, all students would be better served (and served more efficiently) if schools would admit that people learn at different rates, and segregated the children based on that. The disruptive special ed kids, who are often years behind, should have very small classes with other kids of the same level and lots of attention from teachers. Conversely, the kids who are good at math or reading should be put in accelerated classes.

Unfortunately, this kind of separation makes parents unhappy: they want their kids to all be in the "super special" classes despite the fact that on average, their kids are average. Parents are the ones who vote for school board, so school boards are unlikely to do anything that makes parents unhappy.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#538

Post by jedberg » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 7:04 PM UTC

dionidium wrote: post #534

jedberg wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you're married and have a second income, then that second income is basically subsidizing education. My wife was a teacher and retired when our kid was born, because we could. Some time in her 50s she'll be able to draw her pension. But basically the only reason we can afford to live in the Silicon Valley is because I'm an engineer with a decent salary. A lot of her paycheck went right back into her classroo…

> But basically the only reason we can afford to live in the Silicon Valley is because I'm an engineer with a decent salary The existence of California -- and San Francisco, in particular -- makes discussions like this one difficult, because yes, sure, San Francisco is too weird to exist and is therefore basically irrelevant in national policy discussions. I live in Rhode Island. East Coast. An hour from Boston. Expe…

10% of America lives in California. Can't really call it an outlier.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#539

Post by juve1996 » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 7:06 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #294

_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…

The main problem with teachers is that the price for them is not controlled by quality. A teacher who performs better than other teachers (e.g. a 10x teacher) will not be worth more in the current system. And with the quality/price relation missing, there is nothing a teacher can do about the price, and consequently their wages will be as low as possible.

Quality is hard to prove. Everyone thinks they're "quality."

The fact is most people are average. We freak ourselves out about these very few super teachers or super devs but most are not these people and they still need jobs and perform valid functions.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#540

Post by dionidium » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 7:06 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #538

dionidium wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But basically the only reason we can afford to live in the Silicon Valley is because I'm an engineer with a decent salary The existence of California -- and San Francisco, in particular -- makes discussions like this one difficult, because yes, sure, San Francisco is too weird to exist and is therefore basically irrelevant in national policy discussions. I live in Rhode Island. East Coast. An hour from Boston. Expe…

10% of America lives in California. Can't really call it an outlier.

You're right. Outlier is a poor word choice. I just mean to say that increasingly we need separate discussions for the 10% of people who live in CA and the 90% who don't, because the experiences are really quite different.