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Nobody wants to teach anymore

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Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#651

Post by s1artibartfast »

8note wrote: post #631
draebek wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sounds simple but as a society we have decided not to hold parents and students accountable for their actions.

Teachers are left to deal with the impossible burden of raising 30+ kids and fail.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#652

Post by nemothekid »

8note wrote: post #631
draebek wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A secondary problem is that public schools have essentially transformed into state nannys.

1. You can't send the kids home because both parents are probably working. It's more likely the kid becomes lost forever and it becomes a government problem again once that kid is now living an alternative lifestyle that consumes government resources in other ways (crime, homelessness, or health).

2. Because of the realities of (1) everyone else is now forced to asked why the kid is no longer in school and becomes a failure of the teacher that the kid is not in school. The teacher must now deal with disgruntled parents and administrators for not enduring the emotional abuse and disruption a neglected child causes while also dealing with 20 other students.

I think a lot of problems with child education and just be traced back to economic realities of many parents today. Even if you are relatively well off having your kid kicked out of school isn't financially feasible for a lot of families. Even a disruptive child might be the result of absent parents who must be at work to even afford school lunch.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#653

Post by pclmulqdq »

asvitkine wrote: post #623
justsocrateasin wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My guess is that this hasn't changed due to union action or lawsuits because (1) teachers are salaried, and tend to be over the limit where overtime pay is legally required; and (2) union organizers don't think they can get any more money without giving something else up.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#654

Post by obscurette »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #643
obscurette wrote: post #618

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…

I think we can all agree this is not a problem in Finland. Teachers there are paid in accordance with the high respect they're given in society.

Nordic countries do all much better than others in my experience. I'm sure that they have their own problems, but such level of bullshit and disrespect is not one of them indeed.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#655

Post by moeris »

tristor wrote: post #391
_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…

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…

> 2. Well, they are. A teaching certification used to only require two years of higher learning compared to typical 4 for other things. That said, most teachers are actually more highly educated than the average person because schools use educational attainment as direct basis for pay.

Incorrect: it depends on the state, the subject, and the grade level. For secondary education of a core subject, in Michigan, for example, I had to take all of the classes for a normal 4-year degree in the subject, plus taking the equivalent of two years of education classes. Taking 18-20 credit hours per semester, it took me five years to graduate. So the requirements can actually be much more difficult than a normal degree.

When I taught Title I, there was an additional requirement that you had to be "highly qualified". That typically meant a 4-year degree out equivalent experience, no matter the subject or grade level.

Many teachers have a master's not due to pay, as you claim, but because states essentially mandate it. In Michigan you're required to get continuing education credits. I believe the requirement drops off once you have a master's. So it doesn't make a lot of sense not to get one.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#656

Post by gms7777 »

effingwewt wrote: post #280
origin_path wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness a lot of professors are terrible teachers and don't really care about teaching at all. My own course was full of them. I'm sure they didn't like to hear it though.

Or could it possibly be they aren't paid enough to care? Here above you was a professor stating how shit it is to be one, and the very next comment is a student shitting on professors in general. This very thread exemplifies why no one wants to teach.

It's not that they're not paid to care, it's that they're not paid to teach. At least at research universities, tenured/tenure-track faculty's job is to do produce research and get grants. Teaching is a thing that's piled on top of it that doesn't help your career and takes a whole lot of time away from your primary job function.

A lot of professors do actually care about teaching and genuinely want to help students, but the system as designed strongly disincentivizes (or actively punishes) doing more than the bare minimum. I know a professor who was recently denied tenure at a research university that likes to describe itself as very "undergraduate teaching focused" -- he had decent but not outstanding research output, but had gotten several university-wide teaching awards and was broadly considered by students one of the best lecturers in the department. Some of the comments he had received suggest that this actively hurt him for tenure, because they felt he was too focused on teaching over research.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#657

Post by JackFr »

vostok wrote: post #66
lr4444lr wrote: post #15

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…

> 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 […

> Why would someone choose to be a teacher making around the median when you could be a software engineer and make 3x as much?

Is that a serious question?

Why indeed? Maybe because a union job with a state pension (yes, defined benefit pension) that starts at 62K and has an advancing pay scale based only on education level and seniority (yes - job performance unrelated to pay) and very high job security ain’t bad place to be if you can get it.

(And also I suspect that a lot of the people getting those teaching jobs simply would not be able to get 200K software development jobs.)

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#658

Post by pclmulqdq »

8note wrote: post #642
pclmulqdq wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The shoulders of giants and the lone genious myths are the same myth. The giants in question are the lone genii Some ultrabight people did the hard work, and you're just using their stuff. There's no spectrum between 1 and 1

A lot of the people who espouse the "shoulders of giants" myth use it to discredit the idea of the "lone genius" (without thinking about who the giants are). They believe that the giants represent societal knowledge, not individuals who made great contributions.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#659

Post by dorchadas »

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…

> The educational aspect of schools is (mostly, but not entirely) redundant to the resources available for free on the Internet.

I think this overestimates it. What I've found from internet 'learning', myself and others (and the students I used to teach) is that there's more often the illusion of learning than any actual learning. Let's not equate watching a YouTube video and thinking we understand it to actual learning. I've been victim to that myself when trying to learn pure math, and with kids it'll certainly be worse.

And the same issues will carry over to any online textbook too. Teachers are there to actually assess what the kids really learned, not what they think they learned, or what they can google to get past the next question on their assignment. The internet just fosters the illusion of learning (and let's not even get to critical thinking from it).

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#660

Post by madsbuch »

I am considering how the demografic development shapes this.

In the span of 40 years or so, we will from 6 / 1 working to non working to 2 / 1 conclusing in the mid 2030s.

I mean, indifferent to what means of redistribution schema we use, we simply won't get more labor, and issues might need to be solved along other axis. Not expecting the same level of service, etc.

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