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Nobody wants to teach anymore

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Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#631

Post by 8note »

draebek wrote: post #535
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, an…

Send the kid home and fail them for the year? They can try again next year. Well behaved kids are the parents' problem

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#632

Post by Cupertino95014 »

poopypoopington wrote: post #606
Cupertino95014 wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why don't you find out and share with us rather than just asking questions and having others do the work for you. If Finland is really significant to this debate then share some data.

> Why don't you find out and share with us

because it's hard to get, poopy. Even for the US.

I can find their total spending & their general policies on special ed (which I did share), but not that. On the other hand, we do have some Finnish people on HN, so maybe they know.

> If Finland is really significant to this debate

If? They have what's generally considered the best education in the world.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#633

Post by newaccount2021 »

prepend wrote: post #432
sanderjd wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing to compare to is the jobs the teachers could do if they weren't teachers. All of them have college degrees, many have masters degrees. The comparison point should be generic white collar office jobs, which are pretty much all easier (and especially , less annoying), higher paying, and more respected.

Generic office jobs don’t pay that much. At least the kind that require education degrees. And they lack security.

No post body was provided.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#634

Post by metadat »

noasaservice wrote: post #290
brohoolio wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting salaries for many districts for jobs that require a masters is pathetic. Many suburban schools pay decent, but often urban centers pay poorly. I know one person who was offered under $30k for teaching young special Ed folks. This is someone who has a masters and extra certs on tops of that. Your argument about physics teachers being more sought after is interesting but misses the point. As a society we want…

Quoted post unavailable.

100% false, special Ed is a spectrum from high functioning to low functioning. Some kids need extra attention and support to find their element and become successful.

The diaper-changing-babysitting end of things is probably the most difficult job in the school. Think about it, it's one step away from working in a mental institution.

The whole USA teaching system exploits nice salt-of-the-earth types, chews them up, then spits them out. The system makes it difficult to even stay in it as a teacher, the job is littered with madness compared to many other government and private sector jobs.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#635

Post by 8note »

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.

Can you do that over summer without frequent contact with the students?

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#636

Post by colinmhayes »

juve1996 wrote: post #546
carapace wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Online school went pretty well for my kid. No doubt in my mind that she was learning way more than during in person school. The key was probably that she was next door to me the whole time and I had some time to help her with homework that I didn’t before remote. Honestly my child and I both wish they’d go back to remote.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#637

Post by metadat »

prepend wrote: post #437
mattkrause wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people did, actually. The amount of work/responsibility definitely scales with the number of kids, and it's not exactly linear either: one will color quietly, two might play together--or fight, and three or more...yikes. I mentioned the rate because it surprised me it was so close. I'd expect that it costs more to actually educate a kid, and of course, the parents provided the house (and often ice cream and HBO)…

If you can get a job for $10/pupil/hour for 30 kids for 7 hours a day, go for it. ($2,100 per day) I don’t think that exists. So comparing babysitting for a few rich kids to teaching full time makes no sense.

This is effectively what is being allocated to the entire education system per pupil per hour.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#638

Post by greedo »

tptacek wrote: post #608
msrenee wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teaching pays nothing compared to CS, finance, basically most things you need a degree for. Those brilliant individuals who would like to teach have to decide if their passion is worth making less money than some warehouses are paying around here. Those who don't have the grades or abilities to reach for the higher-paid fields have less of a dilemma. We're actively selecting against the candidates who have more lucra…

It depends on where you're teaching; teaching is a terrible deal in rural school districts and in some states, but teaching in urban and especially wealthy suburban school districts is a pretty fantastic deal: it's a white collar salary (every single teacher at the public high school my kids went to makes over $100k) with a defined-benefit pension plan, ironclad job security, and more vacation days than any other pro…

My school district is in a middle sized city with a dominant land grant university. A starting teacher makes $40k. Requires both a BA and a teaching credential. Hours are long, and teachers spend a decent amount of money for out of pocket supplies, especially at some of the schools that despite level funding seem to get the short end of the stick.

IT in my area pays anyone with a pulse and basic computer skills $40k. A rookie developer from our land grant university can easily start at $60K with no experience. And that same developer can earn $100k with two years of good experience. Show me a 3rd year teacher pulling in $100k in my school district. No such unicorn exists.

The city doesn't have a DB pension, just a 403k.

Granted, the newbie teacher gets 1.5 months off in the summer, compared to 2 weeks PTO for the developer.

After 10 years, even assuming the teacher gets a Masters, the pay differential is huge.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#639

Post by andrewprock »

jedberg wrote: post #532
dionidium wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

Most of this change is driven by something other than need. The high school mathematics curriculum is a bit of a funny beast in the US, but it is certainly not the weak point in the system.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#640

Post by Glyptodon »

prepend wrote: post #416
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…

> 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…

My SO works in schools and she seems to work 60 hour weeks 10 months of the year for total compensation circa $60k, which is above the teacher pay scale for her years of experience. Schools seem to be undergoing a slow-motion collapse because every year the needs for specialized professionals go up, and the number of folks willing to do it goes down. Severe mental, social emotional, and behavior problems get worse every year, and even in K-5 schools people start to feel like they're just getting paid to get bit, spat on, and disrespected because there's no systemic solution to bad and crazy parents or neglected kids, let alone the fact that because nobody is willing to work in the conditions the average quality of those left is going down.
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