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Nobody wants to teach anymore

jessicalexicus.medium.com

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Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#691

Post by 300bps »

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.

I think we can all agree this is not a problem in Finland

The county I live in has similar demographics to Finland. We get 350 applications for every open teacher position.

Not very accurate to compare Finland’s homogenous population of 5 million to the United State’s incredibly diverse population of 330 million.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#692

Post by zackmorris »

The fix for this by the way is to pay for school with federal funds instead of state and local. That way rich and poor children receive the same funding.

This is also the reason to ban private school vouchers. That way rich children get taught alongside poor children, which prevents disparities in education quality. It also allows people with the means to afford private schooling to pay for an underprivileged child to still get an education via those tax dollars.

If what I'm saying doesn't sound right to you, then we have an opportunity for a teachable moment. Don't feel bad, I just learned this yesterday. Let me introduce you to horizontal and vertical philosophy:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-horizontal-issue-in-the-cont...

https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/to-unite-a-divided-nation...

Horizontal ethics/politics/philosophy is concerned with the overall well being of the whole. It tends to focus on stuff like justice.

Vertical ethics/politics/philosophy is concerned with doing right within a hierarchy. It tends to focus on stuff like liberty.

Both are required for a society to function. But the US has experienced mostly vertical politics since before the Reagan revolution. So quite candidly, the problems we experience today will most likely be solved through horizontal policies.

HN and most major news sources tend to track with vertical philosophies IMHO. So I tend to have the minority viewpoint here. But that appears to be changing, and I suspect that the world will go more horizontal over the next 10-20 years. A related concept is how generations tend to oppose the policies of their parents, as covered in the book The Fourth Turning:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/670089.The_Fourth_Turnin...

I wish I could say that I've read it, but I hear good things.

Gen Z is coming online now as we enter what I like to think will be a new progressive era. It's facing tremendous opposition from entrenched interests on both the left and right though. So there will likely be deadlock for the next election or two until the last of the Baby Boomers finally retire and relinquish control.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#693

Post by fastaguy88 »

origin_path wrote: post #213
readingnews wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to quote that very paragraph, as a professor teaching three classes this semester, in addition to my 50 hour a week job as the technical director. I see at my university the outside consultants telling us how and when to teach. But OPs first sentence here seems to ring true a lot on my campus. Your boss, HR, some organization called "student success" which is made up of MBAs that have never taught a class…

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.

Could it be that some of those “terrible teachers” are actually excellent teachers for a different kind of student?

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#694

Post by trimbo »

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…

> 5. What is the current model for education based on? [...] Education is about checking a box on a list of requirements that was developed 150+ years ago.

This is very well put. IMO nothing better illustrates how deep-rooted that model is than distance learning in 2020-2021 in the US. That was an opportunity to innovate quickly, and yet no state or district I know of took it seriously. Instead they had students on Zoom for 3-5 hours a day, including 1st-3rd graders, structured as if it was a regular classroom. It served no educational purpose except adhering to the model and requirements you mentioned.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#695

Post by stjohnswarts »

smeej wrote: post #686

It sounds like there are a great many people who want to teach. The real headline should be, "Nobody wants to teach in public schools anymore." And do you blame them? The people (politicians, mostly, in dialogue with union leaders) who make the big decisions about public schools are so many levels removed from the students or the teachers that the best -case scenario for these decisions is to be woefully out of touch…

There are plenty successful public schools out there, why not find out what is making them work instead of giving into those (GOP mostly) who want only the rich to get an education because they can afford private school?

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#696

Post by Wistar »

gorgoiler wrote: post #645

I tried teaching high school CS for the best part of two years in a private school. Everything to do with the pupils was amazing and I loved every moment. I am a natural with behaviour management and although it was stressful, every time the bad kids acted up it presented a teachable moment. You could really feel the impact on their lives and behaviour, well behind the Python and the TCP/IP and while loops. But every…

My wife is a primary public school teacher in the U.S. I read to her your comment, and she said to me, "We have 21 teachers at our school, and only one of them resembles what that comment describes."

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#697

Post by macintux »

christophilus wrote: post #503
simon_o wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I’ve never heard of ”urban” being a code word for “black”. Is that a thing? I assume they mean “urban” as in “city” where you’re likely to have many other forms of opportunity vs “podunk” where you’re kinda stuck in one career because there’s nothing else around.

It's very much a thing.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/06/10/heres-h...

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#699

Post by dionidium »

vkou wrote: post #663
dionidium wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But basically the only reason we can afford to live in the Silicon Valley is because I'm an engineer with a decent salary The existence of California -- and San Francisco, in particular -- makes discussions like this one difficult, because yes, sure, San Francisco is too weird to exist and is therefore basically irrelevant in national policy discussions. I live in Rhode Island. East Coast. An hour from Boston. Expe…

> San Francisco is too weird to exist and is therefore basically irrelevant in national policy discussions. Not SF, but more people live in LA County than in the ten least popular states. If only we could ignore them and their 20 senators as completely irrelevant when it came to national policy discussions... (We can't, and we don't.)

I don't actually want to ignore San Francisco's problems. [0] I would just say that its existence makes national conversations more difficult.

[0] I would tell California that they need to permit about 10x as much housing if they want any more federal help. The U.S. Government should not take on the role of dealing with the consequences of such an obvious self-own. "Our teachers can't find places to live and also it's illegal to build apartments on practically every single lot in the state -- what should we do?" is a question that answers itself.

If you want to be in the Union, then one thing you have to do is allow internal migration, and by that I mean actually allow it, which means you have to allow newcomers to build housing. If you're not allowing newcomers to build housing, then you are not actually in any real sense fulfilling your obligations to the rest of the country.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#700

Post by Jensson »

bobthepanda wrote: post #641
8note wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Lesson plans vary by the day, so I’m not sure how exactly you would do that without the data from the previous day.

Teachers aren't paid to personalize lessons though, if you work overtime to do that then you can only blame yourself. Teachers are paid to hold standardized lessons and answer questions help students with problems.

You could argue it would be better if teachers were paid to personalize lectures, but they aren't. Maybe some document somewhere says they should, but in practice nothing will happen to you if you just use standardized lectures so that is what most will do and that is what the expectations of the job is built around.

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