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

adamcadre.ac

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

#551

Post by cycomanic »

giantg2 wrote: post #389
thundergolfer wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that FIRE type people are ill suited for teaching because their interest is in minimising retirement age and not being good teachers? The ideology of “earning to retire” vs. “living to teach”?

I'm saying that if you pay teachers a salary consistent with an MIT grad that was able to FIRE, that you will attract people solely for the money. If we are compensating teachers at 4-5x the median salary, then I would gladly quit my job and become a teacher even though I have no real interest in it. I believe that the best teachers enjoy their jobs and are not just looking for the money. Now we could use a performan…

So why should people not go into teaching for the money. Are you saying you are not good at your job because you are motivated by money? That's a weird take, or does that only apply to teachers not other jobs? If so why?

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

#552

Post by TulliusCicero »

giantg2 wrote: post #346
ericd wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had one amazing high school math teacher who graduated from MIT at 18, and was teaching all the way up to diff eq in public schools. He’d made his money and then decided to teach because he was annoyed that his sons’ math teachers sucked. There’s absolutely no way teacher salary+pension was competitive with what he was making in industry. And we should want a lot more people who are like him teaching, without the n…

Not necessarily. People who are really smart and great in industry are not necessarily great teachers. Frankly, if you are talking about making the salary competitive with one that allows FIRE will have the opposite effect that you want (ideology vs money).

> People who are really smart and great in industry are not necessarily great teachers.

Is there data on the average effectiveness there?

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

#553

Post by Jare »

brightball wrote: post #447
6f8986c3 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teaching doesn’t attract highly paid workers because in addition to a big pay cut those workers would be considering likely worse working conditions as well. You could double teacher pay and it wouldn't make a lick of difference. As a teacher, you have no control over your classroom. Disruptive students that destroy everybody else's learning environment? Too bad. No Child Left Behind! Wait, that's the old slogan, w…

Stuff like this drives the push for things like vouchers. I’m lucky to be able to send my kids to a good private school. We chose it after a tour and discussion with the headmaster about exactly how it operates. The teachers as a group research and plan curriculum. They coordinate across grade levels and determine how to roll out changes in the most effective way possible for students and parents as well. They rolled…

Vouchers add power to parents, and we've (I think) already agreed that parents are a large part of the problem. Even worse: unlike policies, standards, regulations, boards, administrations, and rules, you can't change parents. Even worst: you can manipulate parents, and perverse incentives all but guarantee that evil people will be attracted to this opportunity.

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

#554

Post by spoonjim »

I’ve noticed that in the time since I was a kid, the focus of public school has shifted from about the 40th percentile student to the 5th percentile student. In my school, the entire focus of the operation was the decent student... the one who showed up, put in a decent effort, did at least three quarters of their homework. The school had tremendous resources for these kids to go to college, and the very best colleges for the very top students. There was honors, accelerated, standard, and remedial and the kids who were really trying would never be sent to remedial because that’s where the true losers were sent (in a different building) where they couldn’t disrupt anyone else’s learning. Nobody cared what happened to those kids including in many cases their own parents.

Now in my kids school I see way too much focus on this segment, which is by its nature low ROI — the number of teacher years it takes to turn one of those kids into someone worthwhile is like 10x the amount it takes to turn an average bright kid into a future surgeon or researcher.

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

#555

Post by esyir »

Lammy wrote: post #337
DSingularity wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say “until we are dominated by idiot majority” as if it hasn’t happened. Just look at the platforms of the peoples vote to represent Americans. Rarely are they platform that would actually matter to the people and most of the time it is identity politics, nationalism, gun rights, and religion. We can’t even have a nuanced conversation about anything in politics that doesn’t devolve into an ideological/tribal argu…

> We can’t even have a nuanced conversation about anything in politics that doesn’t devolve into an ideological/tribal argument. I think the US is already dominated by idiots in every state. Gotta appreciate the irony of this statement. The Idiot Tribe are victims of The System, not driving it. They are not my enemy.

Agreed. If we're using education and related achievements as a barometer for "not idiots", the American ruling class are hardly uneducated dimwits. Those at the highest rungs of power in politics, academia and the mass media are almost without exception highly educated graduates of top institutes. If they fail, that's clearly on them, and not the "idiot tribe".

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

#557

Post by Thorrez »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #526
Thorrez wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the public has identified the man The father collecting petitions or the person attempting to steal petitions?

The person who successfully stole petitions: https://twitter.com/SF_BoP/status/1405219022413590531

Thanks for the info.

But I'm not sure I would consider it a complete success. It looks to me like he stole them then people surrounded him and forced him to give them back a minute later.

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

#558

Post by Tade0 »

eplanit wrote: post #296

Meanwhile, China is pushing its children to learn so much more, and is developing one of the most educated populations on earth[1]. They'll win by our own implosion. [1] https://wenr.wes.org/2019/12/education-in-china-3

> while the country’s tertiary gross enrollment rate (GER) spiked from 7.6 percent to 50 percent (compared with a current average GER of 75 percent in high income countries, per UNESCO).

It appears that they still haven't caught up.

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

#559

Post by dr_dshiv »

glitchc wrote: post #291

In North America, teachers are grossly underpaid and their ability to discipline poor performance has been entirely eviscerated. It’s not just SF, look at what’s happening in Vancouver: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-cutting-honours-... The problem is the administration: The board that sets the standards and the parents and politicians who sit on those boards. The solution is this: Ban anyone without a m…

Average salary for teachers is $63k, across all states. In NY or CA, it is about $85k [1]. This does not include benefits (e.g., health care or a ~$50k/y pension for retirement at age 60 [2])

And there are 2.5 months in the summer for r&r or for working additional jobs [3]. You need two wage earners to be solidly middle class, but this is not a "grossly underpaid" profession. For comparison, a university engineering professor salary in Netherlands starts at 65k euros ($77k).

Bottomline: teaching is not going to make you rich but you aren't grossly underpaid.

[1] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_211.60.a... [2] https://www.teacherpensions.org/states [3] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2019/07/11/tea...

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

#560

Post by Thorrez »

Sbuu wrote: post #536
Thorrez wrote: post #522

>Another thing I’ve discovered is that many students— not just a couple here and there, but several in every class— consistently use umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes. >I don’t know how this happens— I had to do some poking around on character code tables just to figure out how to replicate the effect. Look at the Spanish Mexican keyboard layout: http://kbdlayout.info/…

In my opinion, those wrong characters are probably coming from some OCR software used on badly scanned books. Those "several students" probably all used the same text database which has this particular issue.

I sometimes see an acute accent used instead of an apostrophe in reddit comments. People aren't scanning old books into reddit comments. It's the keyboard layout.

Also the article author seems to be pretty confident in his ability to detect plagiarized content, and didn't seem to think that stuff was plagiarized.

I personally sometimes type the acute accent instead of an apostrophe. I have the Spain Spanish keyboard installed in Windows in addition to the American English keyboard. I meant to install the Mexican Spanish keyboard but installed the Spain Spanish keyboard by mistake. It was many months until I realized my mistake, and by then I was more used to the Spain Spanish layout than the Mexican Spanish layout, so I kept it. When I'm practicing Spanish I switch to the Spanish keyboard, and often forget about it, so then type an acute accent when I want to type an apostrophe.

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