641–650 of 1001 posts
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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?
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Do software engineers just spontaneously come into existence? Or do they begin their education with kindergarten teachers, and progress though to the professors that teach them at college? If a software engineer is contributing millions of dollars in value each year, they are doing it on the backs of the giants that taught and coached them to get to where they are today.
If you want to follow the value chain all the way down, why not attribute the value of that software engineer to the professors who taught those kindergarten teachers to be good teachers? Or the kindergarten teachers who taught those professors? The truth of where the value to society comes from is somewhere between the "shoulders of giants" myth (that everything is obvious in light of what came before, and nobody re…
Some ultrabight people did the hard work, and you're just using their stuff. There's no spectrum between 1 and 1
1. This is not about America. I'm from Eastern Europe and we have the very same problems. 2. This is not about money. Yes, being underpaid is part of a problem how teachers feel, but no money compensates humiliation and bullying teachers are experiencing. 3. It's not a rant. This EXACTLY how I feel after spending three years at school. I was a math teacher in classes of my kids because a school couldn't find any. Yes…
1. This is not about America. I'm from Eastern Europe and we have the very same problems. 2. This is not about money. Yes, being underpaid is part of a problem how teachers feel, but no money compensates humiliation and bullying teachers are experiencing. 3. It's not a rant. This EXACTLY how I feel after spending three years at school. I was a math teacher in classes of my kids because a school couldn't find any. Yes…
It's not just about the money, but I think the mediocre pay combined with all the bullshit is just too much.
The point was that you can't compensate all this bullshit with money. OK, you might find some people who can do anything for money, but not so many you can fill all positions in public education system.
But everything to do with working with other teachers was utter misery. Never have I met such a cantankerous downtrodden passive aggressive bunch of backstabbing political jobsworths. Actually, it was probably only one third of the staff that were the hyper negative old timers, but they had such a dismal impact on me it felt like everyone was cut from the same cliquey snobby cloth. Imagine the worst, most power hungry, little-napoleon office manager you’ve ever had and then imagine one in three of the staff have that mindset.
It drove me mad and I’m now a SWE again but also volunteering at a youth center in our most deprived part of town and loving it. I can have impact with the kids, and as a volunteer I seem to command much more respect from parents than a lowly teacher.
So now I am tainted too — if I hear you are a teacher then I will see before me someone who at best tolerates that level of crappiness in their workplace, and at worst actively takes part in it. Neither leave me with much respect for you, but I know why you do it: the kids.
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Do software engineers just spontaneously come into existence? Or do they begin their education with kindergarten teachers, and progress though to the professors that teach them at college? If a software engineer is contributing millions of dollars in value each year, they are doing it on the backs of the giants that taught and coached them to get to where they are today.
You totally missed the point though. The value you create has almost nothing to do with how much you’re paid. That’s just the most you could possibly be paid. You’re paid the amount your employer thinks it would cost to replace you.
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I'm a software dev as well, coming from a family of educators (dad, mom, brother, all three have taught at some point during their career or for an extended part of their career). The problem I think is that you're examining 'working more' in the context of 'work output'. As a developer, it is very much about 'work output', however as a teacher it is often not. In my moms example, she had roughly 6x50 minute classes…
Why hasn't this changed through union action or lawsuits about needing to work unpaid hours? Surely, an employee should be able to take an employer to court about the employer requiring work that's unpaid. In the courtroom, presumably there can be evidence presented about how these unpaid hours are required by examining experiences of other teachers, etc.
The other reasons this hasn't changed are
a) This is just "how things are". It's more or less considered the "normal" way of doing education.
b) Changing it would require increasing education budgets by a fairly significant amount, and since those are all local, and based on local property taxes, they are much more likely to have a bunch of entitled rich people coming in to say "I shouldn't have to pay any taxes to support those damn kids" and voting for budget cuts. (Because the people who aren't rich don't have the time and energy to be coming in to these meetings on a regular basis.)
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> 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…
I'm a software dev as well, coming from a family of educators (dad, mom, brother, all three have taught at some point during their career or for an extended part of their career). The problem I think is that you're examining 'working more' in the context of 'work output'. As a developer, it is very much about 'work output', however as a teacher it is often not. In my moms example, she had roughly 6x50 minute classes…
You're hanging out on a website where people regularly talk about how college should be abolished/de-emphasized because it's not needed to get a good job. Yea unfortunately, a lot of people here really DO think those people who go into journalism/art/music are stupid because they're not working in more lucrative fields.
Of course they do that while listening to music and probably enjoying art. Of course.
I realize this piece is more of a rant, and I won't hold it to a data accuracy standard it never pretended to have, but they pay issue is really misconstrued. Salaries in large urban districts are often well above area median, and when accounting for benefits and pension, quite impressive. In South Dakota and a number of states in the south and rural districts, yes it is another story, and it is bad. Also, teachers N…
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> 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.