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Nobody wants to teach anymore

jessicalexicus.medium.com

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Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#591

Post by VirusNewbie »

bobthepanda wrote: post #445
VirusNewbie wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Making/updating lesson plans Why? Are they really better than khan academy at doing a lesson plan? Isn’t this like a software engineer complaining they have to write their own database driver in their spare time after work?

In general, it is a good idea to personalize lesson plans based on how well people did or didn’t react to the last one, and khan academy certainly doesn’t do anything like that, nor does it work for everyone.

The entire point of khan academy is that it is individually tailored to the student and can decide what lessons need additional practice vs those that can be skipped. It sounds like you aren’t at all awqre of how khan academy works.

Are you claiming teachers can personalize a lesson plan for each individual student in a class? To a granularity finer than what Khan Academy can do?

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#592

Post by scarmig »

pessimizer wrote: post #486
gshubert17 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's a big step for parents to leave the default neighborhood school, look over the various options, even staying in the same city, let alone moving to a different district. I agree with you there. The admissions people take some time to represent the whole story or big picture to prospective parents, because the school is not for everybody. I don't think it's cherry-picking to encourage parents to find the best…

> I don't think it's cherry-picking to encourage parents to find the best school for their children, even if it isn't yours. Why? Because "cherry-picking" is bad and the best things for children are good? It's, of course, exactly cherry-picking to find the children with the most interested and motivated parents, then filter them down to the ones that you like best. Fuck the kids with bad or no parents.

If I'm a parent who is typically interested and motivated, am I committing a sin against social justice if I am interested and motivated in my children's education and work to provide opportunities for them to learn?

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#593

Post by acjohnson55 »

azemetre wrote: post #516
acjohnson55 wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ah, the engineer who thinks everything can be solved with software. Just as a bit of feedback, starting your comment like this may have turned off the original poster to the rest of your thoughts, which I agree with.

Sometimes we all need to be slapped with a fish in the face in order to see how credulous we are with our biases.

My comment is net -1 right now, and I don't believe I made any assumptions about the person I responded to in the feedback I tried to offer. If people don't think my feedback is useful, that's fine, but if I had started it off with something like "ah, the presumptuous teacher", I'm pretty sure it would be been received even worse.

I read the initial comment as asking a naive question, but I think that's great, as long as they are open to answers that contradict their assumptions. People should be able to do that and get earnest answers without backhanded comments. Asking naive questions is a big part of how I learn, personally.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#594

Post by bena »

notch656a wrote: post #579
bena wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Special education is exactly as well defined as that. Gifted children fall under the banner of special education as well. They also require resources average students don't.

I'd also be against disproportionately spending on "gifted" children. I also doubt "gifted" are much of a drain. I was in all the honors classes and basically spent my entire day reading whatever I liked, ignoring my teachers and basically demanding no time from anyone. Teachers finally learned to leave me completely alone except to grade the test because I always passed with flying colors and had zero interest in in…

You were in "gen pop". Honors classes are just that, honors classes. Gifted classes are another thing altogether.

If you agree with the guy I responded to, in that you wouldn't mind removing the mentally challenged from the school system entirely, boy, that's not a good look for you.

Because the difference between the average student to those with severe learning disabilities is the same as the difference between truly gifted students and even the honors students. And here's how you can tell the difference. Honors classes are always a full class. I've not been in a single honors class that wasn't the average class size. Gifted classes are like 5 to 10 students. I personally knew every other gifted student in my high school. Grades 9 - 12, knew them all. There were not that many, roughly 30 any given year. Across all four grades.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#595

Post by jedberg »

meetingthrower wrote: post #424
tristor wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Administrators. We have insane administrative bloat, especially in higher ed. In some institutions there is nearly a 1:1 count of administrators to faculty. Ironically, given the social politics implied by the author, a significant amount of administration bloat is specifically tied to DEI. 2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other…

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…

I read a book a while back whose main argument was that we spend so much on the bottom 1% (special ed), why aren't we spending an equal amount on the top 1%? Why don't the smartest kids get one on one instruction and special resources that no one else gets?

To be fair the author was fairly balanced and presented the arguments against, such as that they tend to come from wealthier families that can provide that support, that they will be fine on their own without it whereas the bottom 1% need the support, and so on.

But it was an interesting thought experiment none the less. What would our society look like if we spent as much on the top 1% of students as the bottom? Or do we already via college education?

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#596

Post by lr4444lr »

justin66 wrote: post #409
lr4444lr wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not above learning something. Texas seems to be district-dependent, and CA is statewide: https://www.trs.texas.gov/Pages/active_member_social_securit... https://www.calstrs.com/social-security This is not the case for NY, and not in WI and PA as I have heard from teachers there. In cases where they don't receive it though, they're not paying into it either. I can't comment as to whether that is a good or bad thin…

> In cases where they don't receive it though, they're not paying into it either. If the "it" you're referring to is social security, this is, to use your phrase from above, "patently untrue." It would be comforting if that were the case, but there are cases where a person who has paid into social security will not receive anything from it, and will not receive their spouse's Social Security survivor's benefits, unde…

Not disagreeing with what you just wrote above,but do you have a source for

> If the "it" you're referring to is social security, this is, to use your phrase from above, "patently untrue."

? Because everything I am reading suggests those states whose teachers whose work years only go to pension and not SS eligibility are not having their teachers pay into SS.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#598

Post by kube-system »

spoils19 wrote: post #529
notch656a wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Agreed. We also have to consider the comparative ROI.

The benefits to disability accommodation are primarily non-monetary, which is why market forces do an awful job of providing them.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#599

Post by bluGill »

prepend wrote: post #412
tristor wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Administrators. We have insane administrative bloat, especially in higher ed. In some institutions there is nearly a 1:1 count of administrators to faculty. Ironically, given the social politics implied by the author, a significant amount of administration bloat is specifically tied to DEI. 2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other…

Administration seems to be entirely manually based and has lots of positions that should be consolidated or automated. For example, each school in my county has at least one person dedicated to managing iPads and tech equipment. This isn’t the networking and server support or even desktop support, that’s done centrally. This is just a human who hands them out, collects them, and processes warranty claims. The person…

I don't get why kids have such things. Other than typing there really isn't anything kids need to learn that is better done with a computer until high school. (Even then everything could be done with paper, but word processors are useful for writing)

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#600

Post by acjohnson55 »

simonw wrote: post #551
acjohnson55 wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Planning needs to be responsive to how the prior lessons went. You can't simply pre-plan a whole year and expect those lessons to be effective. Eventually, you can get close to that point, if you are lucky enough to teach the same subject for years. But much like you can't expect a standup comedian to perform someone else's routine effectively, as a teacher, each individual has to figure out what's effective for them…

This is one of the many things that I find so interesting about effective teaching. Your students are forming a mental model of how something works. Your job is to help guide them to the correct mental model. If their mental model goes wrong, you have to debug it: you need to figure out exactly what they've misunderstood (which could be anything, and could be from years before your lessons with them started) and help…

Yep, done correctly, it's a lot like debugging. Although, maybe in reverse. When I'm debugging, I'm trying to learn from the infallible machine how my assumption of how my own code works is incorrect :)
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