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Nobody wants to teach anymore

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Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#541

Post by [deleted] »

aetherson wrote: post #136
vostok wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Salaries in large urban districts are often well above area median Is the median the correct benchmark? The median household income in NYC was $67k in 2021 [0]. Why would someone choose to be a teacher making around the median [1] when you could be a software engineer and make 3x as much? It's not just a matter of trinkets and baubles. That difference allows you to comfortably afford a nice family sized apartment […

People might want to be teachers rather than software engineers because teachers get enormous amounts of time off, have extremely high levels of job security, plus all the usual reasons that not everyone is in the very highest paying profession. Why aren't you a hedge fund manager?

[deleted]

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#542

Post by juve1996 »

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #351
analog31 wrote: post #247

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…

Did you adjust for population?

> Really, the cost to educate a child should have gone down substantially relative to inflation given new technologies that make teaching easier and faster.

None of the technologies solved any problems, really. Math is still math. Reading still requires reading. Technology hasn't done anything but perhaps provide more access and information - if you're motivated, you have great options, but most children are not motivated like this.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#543

Post by jedberg »

dionidium wrote: post #540
jedberg wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you're right in that discussions need to be different for different parts of the country, but I think the split is urban and not-urban. A lot of California is urban, but so is a lot of New York, Massachusetts, Washington, Oregon, Illinois, etc etc. as far as where the population lives. And all have similar problems when it comes to education.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#544

Post by swores »

RHSeeger wrote: post #467
throw0101a wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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): * htt…

> You still have to pay the bills before retirement. That's a valid point, but choices need to be made. Go to the teachers union and ask if they'd be willing to drop future pensions (and cap current ones to the benefits payed in so far) in exchange for a higher salary (based on the amount saved by not longer having pensions). My guess would be that they wouldn't even be willing to discuss it.

You're talking as if "choices need to be made" doesn't extend to the question of whether or not they get enough tax dollars total, regardless of split between income and pensions.

But actually, you're the only commenter I've so far seen in the thread who claims that their pensions are enough to make up for their salaries. Personally I think both salaries and pensions for (most) teachers should increase, in most countries including the US, and I have no problem with teachers' unions not being willing to have a discuss boxed into your opinion that they already get as much as they deserve.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#545

Post by jmugan »

As a father of 3 kids, one thing that gets lost in these discussions is the fact that some teachers are great and some are bad, like really bad. We need to give the good ones more money and freedom and the bad ones means and incentive to improve or find a new profession.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#546

Post by juve1996 »

carapace wrote: post #408
r3trohack3r wrote: post #176

> Nobody wants to teach Counterpoint: the internet is full of people who want to teach. The first school of YouTube is overflowing with educational content on everything from merge sort to patching dry-wall. A large portion of my social circle hold teaching/mentorship as a career goal. I don't think this is pedantic. When I look around, I see a surplus of people that want to learn and want to teach. What I don't see…

This. The Internet obviates most of our current educational system. E.g., textbooks are absurd in a world where every child has a radio-networked pocket supercomputer. The daycare aspect of schools is broken, obviously, but that's a deep societal problem far beyond the ability of teachers to fix. The educational aspect of schools is (mostly, but not entirely) redundant to the resources available for free on the Inter…

People with kids will tell you how well "internet education" went the last 2 years...

This isn't a technology problem. Kids are still kids. Fortnite will still be more fun than doing math, whether that's on a computer or in a classroom.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#547

Post by bArray »

_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…

> 4. Many school problems are caused by disruptive children.

> Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. Throwing more money into schools won’t ever fix this problem.

Some. Most children I believe require an approach that the education system cannot adequately provide (for numerous reasons). Children are relatively malleable and in the right environment will thrive.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#548

Post by dorchadas »

supertofu wrote: post #469
selimthegrim wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like giving the finger to the man who wants to screw your over and take resources from you.

But how do people get the idea that school/college are trying to screw them over?

Where I'm from, it's because of coal mines. They saw their parents and grandparents do reasonably well (financially; health is a-whole-nother story) in the mines without a degree or with only a basic degree and they accepted that school wasn't necessary. Now you have people telling them it is, and doing better because they had more education. It gets to the point where they see that as not trying to screw them over but as elitism, so they blame those people that the options of the past aren't there anymore, and look to try to make themselves feel better.

Though lots of America is fundamentally based in anti-intellectualism. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was an eye-opening read and helped explain a lot of what I saw around me in the rural Bible Belt.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#549

Post by AlbertCory »

int0x2e wrote: post #525
bergenty wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Special Ed is as stupid as doing open heart surgeries on 85 year olds to give them 3 extra years. They’re an enormous burden on the system and are ruining everything for almost all of us. Why do severely mentally handicapped kids even need to be educated. Just provide them with an amount of money to live their lives and make their time here as happy as possible. There is going to be a reckoning.

I suspect you haven't met too many people in these programs. I had a student in one of my university programs who was handicapped and could barely see 3ft in front of him. Guy had to ride in a motorized chair, get guided around campus, and use a super-zoom lens and a laptop screen that made everything 10x-50x its size to be able to read the whiteboard/presentations. I'm sure none of that stuff was cheap. But that guy…

He probably hasn't, but we have to look at total numbers, not anecdotes.

What do countries with education systems that are superior to the US in almost every metric do with these kids? We need to look at the best way to handle it, not just how much we care in the abstract.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#550

Post by sseagull »

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…

In addition to changing cohorts that others mention - What are the chances the way you taught it last year is the most effective way?

Good teachers experiment - maybe something they taught last time didn't go over too well, how can that be improved? Can they make the material even more relevant this year?

Also, it makes teaching it more interesting, rather than regurgitating lessons. Teachers are human after all.

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