Nobody wants to teach anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#671

Post by light_hue_1 » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 9:14 PM UTC

andrewprock wrote: post #459

light_hue_1 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans. Nonsense. Even the most basic look at the numbers shows you this is absolutely false. Let's take a rich liberal state first. MA. Average teacher salary: $60k. Average pension $43k. Teachers contribute 9.78% of their salary in order to get this pension! The state contributes 18.17% This is not all that different from a 401k. You're confusin…

Pensions are typically not paid based on average teacher salary, but paid based on terminal teacher salary. Defined benefit pensions are quite different from a 401k. In our district, once you qualify for a pension you get 2% of your terminal salary per year you work. If you work for 40 years, you will be paid 80% of your last year's salary.

I don't understand this reply.

I quoted you the actual statistics for MA. https://www.teacherpensions.org/state/massachusetts

Teachers pay into the system, quite substantially, at rates that are similar to what you would pay for a 401k. And their average pensions are quite low.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

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Post by avsteele » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 9:17 PM UTC

Never trust an article with no numbers in it.

Median teacher pay in NJ is $73K in 2020, and they get summer off.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

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Post by lawrenceyan » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 9:19 PM UTC

Increase salaries, which will transitively increase the respect and prestige that teachers get in an actionable manner. Thanking them isn’t enough.

An alternative is to automate the teacher away. But I think most people would agree that there’s still immense value in having a human being in the picture here.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

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Post by deanCommie » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 9:21 PM UTC

chadash wrote: post #134

_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…

> Disruptive children are caused by parents who frankly just don’t give a shit. Throwing more money into schools won’t ever fix this problem. I was a disruptive child and my parents were the opposite of people who didn’t give a shit. Both of them highly valued education and spent plenty of time with me. they just had to contend with a child who wasn’t well behaved at school and it was genetics more than anything they…

Dude, are you me? I'm the same way. Highly educated parents, very supportive. I was a major disruptive shithead all through school - in retrospect probably because I was bored. I was not any better as a teenager, but calmed down post university graduation.

Now I have a highly disruptive 2-year old that Preschool calls "behavioural issues" and wants psychologists involved. And I'm like "yes, we're willing to have those conversations", but secretly I think "He'll have the same journey as me - I will need to make sure he's sufficiently physically and intellectually stimulated for the next 20 years, and everything will turn out fine." Of course it's not fair to place that burden on others - his peers, or educators - and I will do as much as I can in extracurricular time, BUT, there's only so much my partner and I can do.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

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Post by s1artibartfast » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 9:22 PM UTC

MarcScott wrote: post #324

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I guess it's all relative. I'm a software engineer at a startup. On average I work about 50-55 hours a week. I get 3 weeks of vacation a year. I certainly don't deny that teachers spend a lot of time working on their "time off". But that said, I've known more than a few teachers personally, and yes, they still do get enormous amounts of time off. Heck, a bunch of them will even admit it is the biggest perk of…

When I was teaching I worked a 7am to 6pm job, 5 days a week. That was actually in the school building, so that's 55 hours right there. The two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, when I wasn't looking after 35 teenagers in a small, hot and unventilated classroom, were spent marking, planning lessons and writing reports. Have you ever had a job where you literally have to plan how much you drink, so…

I feel that this scales largely based on subject mater, experience, and past history teaching a particular course. I know a number of teachers and there are a lot of differences. Expectations vary by district, school, and parents. There have been many top down changes over time, mostly for the worse increasing workload.

When I was in HS, it was not uncommon to have lecture most days and a graded assignment once a week or even less. This is obviously a lot less work for teachers. In the best cases it can be a 7—4 job with summers completely off.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

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Post by epgui » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 9:22 PM UTC

8note wrote: post #626

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 if teaching was a $2M/year job, plenty of people would want to teach. They might not be good at it, but actually good money will draw many candidates

And, sadly, good pay would probably be the thing that would most boost the social respect we show teachers.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#677

Post by aantix » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 9:23 PM UTC

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…

The earlier a skill is learned, the greater the ROI.

What’s the ROI on properly learning to read vs learning that force=mass*acceleration?

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

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Post by ninkendo » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 9:24 PM UTC

Unrelated, but when did Medium become broken in Reader mode in Safari? Reader only shows the first paragraph now, with an ellipsis after, which seems intentional on Medium’s part.

It’s unfortunate because this seems like an interesting article but I don’t want to subject myself to their website in order to read it.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#679

Post by d0mine » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 9:25 PM UTC

jedberg wrote: post #495

douglaswlance wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need to plan/grade ? Why isn't that automated?

Ah, the engineer who thinks everything can be solved with software. To automate grading you first must create a general AI, because if you just do multiple choice exams, you aren't really testing or measuring someone's ability to perform the task, you're just measuring their ability to make a good guess. And some teachers do that. But not the good ones. As for planning, some senior teachers have filing cabinets label…

Software is a tool that can be used effectively in education (e.g., Khan Academy). Nobody says it is the only tool that you should use.

If you are saying that 100% of grading must be manual, it implies 0% effectiveness of Khan Academy (false). In practice, even if just a half of the tests can be automated, it would free the time for teachers to do the work that can't be automated.

Software can provide a great leverage.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

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Post by mberning » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 9:27 PM UTC

Lot of sympathy here for teachers, which is very understandable. I am sure many of them, especially those early in their career, have a very miserable existence. But on the flip side I know several teachers that “stuck it out” and are making well over 100k annually working 9 months a year in low cost of living Ohio. In fact two of them are married, so they have a household income approaching 250k per year in an area where median household income is well under 100k. Teachers are very good at “putting on the poor mouth”, but many of them are living very comfortable lifestyles. And the administrators even more so. Their salaries would make some engineers blush.