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Nobody wants to teach anymore

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Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#731

Post by another_story »

dionidium wrote: post #527
jedberg wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

Your day is 8 hours long and includes 5 hours of meetings, 1 hour which is composed of duties and and maybe 30 to 45 mins for lunch. You've now got 1.5 hours to make "small adjustments" to the 4 classes you teach. Also, maybe you need to do some grading, deal with unruly kids, document what you did for those kids with IEPs, field emails, and adjustments for whatever latest fad the school admin is applying to the curriculum.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#732

Post by Cupertino95014 »

notch656a wrote: post #723
kube-system wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An equal monetary investment for disabled children would mean they don’t have a teacher. You might be able to teach 50 non-disabled children with 2 teachers that costs $100K each to employ. An equal $4000/student/year is not enough to hire anyone for a special needs student, who 1) won’t be able to benefit from the economy of scale in a normal classroom and 2) has needs that require a larger portion of a person’s tim…

If the school can't or won't educate the student with his/her equal allotment, then the school needs to return the monetary allotment to the parents for parental discretion on how to educate the child. If the state fails to provide the service with the allotment available, you don't just start taking from the other kids' pie. >An equal $4000/student/year You're off by almost 4x the average if you live in the US. For…

I like this, because it would probably be better both for society and for the kids.

Let's say the state spends $15K per student with no disabilities. The state says to the parent, "OK, we'll give you $25K to take care of your kid."

The parents grumble, but they find a school that caters to those kids and will take that voucher. Would it be much worse than they're getting now? I doubt it. If it is, the state can subsidize that school, and probably still end up spending less than they are now.

Now it's a question of money, as it should be for a state-wide program. Would the state say "we'll give you $150K to take care of your kid?" Probably not. Really extreme cases that need that much money could be handled by other public & private organizations, but the state gains a measure of reasonableness for the school budget.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#733

Post by carapace »

dorchadas wrote: post #659
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…

> 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 learn…

I've heard a proverb (I want to say Pacific Islands but I'm not sure of the source), "Knowledge is only rumor until it's in the muscle."

When I say "mostly, but not entirely" redundant what I mean is that the things that schools can offer over and above the information on the Internet are a small subset of what they're doing now, and the industry that supports them is largely a relic (e.g. the textbook industry.)

Schools can still offer in-person mentoring and tutoring, and lab facilities with supervision, but if you take away the daycare aspects of schools I think that's about all that's left (of the educational aspects.) The regimented scheduling, most of the buildings and school bus systems, etc. are the now-unnecessary bits.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#734

Post by havblue »

300bps wrote: post #691
TimTheTinker wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This isn't entirely a criticism of the parent post, but praise of entirely different education systems comes across as Finland ex machina: just do what they do and our problems are solved. Aside from the parenting component which is a huge part of student success, there's also the question of replacing school boards, administration staff, hiring better teachers of course and reforming local laws. And of course the teachers unions and the financial issues with pensions. There's no easy way to transition out of our existing problems and parents with the means just hit the eject button, sending their kids to private schools.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#735

Post by HighPlainsDrftr »

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…

I always phrase it as the principles (mostly add/delete) stay the same, but the methods are almost always different. Once you learn the principle, it's always about the method of getting there.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#736

Post by throwaway675309 »

Part of it definitely has to deal with the country where you're teaching, the kind of school (public vs private), surrounding socioeconomic conditions, age group, etc.

I taught ESL overseas in elementary and junior high school in Taiwan for years. Compared to my experiences teaching in the United States, the children are just empirically better behaved. There is an ingrained culture of respect for teachers and it shows.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#737

Post by just_boost_it »

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

When I grew up, there were different classes for the smart kids and the less smart kids. There was a bottom class where the students had all sorts of behavioural issues. Some people just won't learn, and I think it's fair to separate them from the people who do. At least that way, teachers get at least a few classes of eager students.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#738

Post by galaxyLogic »

dhosek wrote: post #457

Former HS math teacher here. It was the hardest job I’ve ever had. I still have nightmares about being back in the classroom 18 years later. I was easily working 12+ hours a day doing class planning, grading, etc. not to mention the actual teaching. Returning to programming my pay doubled and my stress level dropped profoundly. Teacher pay should easily be double what it is. (And about that summers off—with the excep…

Teacher's job is no doubt stressful. Therefore I think we must invent new ways of automating the teaching, amplify the powers of a single teacher. That way there will be enough teachers to provide for every child. Not sure how to get there.

But what about the adult population? I think large swaths of it are in need of more education. Math literacy, evidence-based evaluation of propaganda. Large portion of US population believes last election was stolen.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#739

Post by galaxyLogic »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #593
azemetre wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes we all need to be slapped with a fish in the face in order to see how credulous we are with our biases.

My comment is net -1 right now, and I don't believe I made any assumptions about the person I responded to in the feedback I tried to offer. If people don't think my feedback is useful, that's fine, but if I had started it off with something like "ah, the presumptuous teacher", I'm pretty sure it would be been received even worse. I read the initial comment as asking a naive question, but I think that's great, as lon…

"ah, the presumptuous teacher" .

That is a perfect example of bad discourse.

Why is it bad? Because it is "Ad Hominem". It attacks the person making the comment, not the reasoning in the comment.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ad-hominem

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#740

Post by dale_glass »

HighPlainsDrftr wrote: post #735
jedberg wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I always phrase it as the principles (mostly add/delete) stay the same, but the methods are almost always different. Once you learn the principle, it's always about the method of getting there.

That's still work though. You might know all you need to know on the subject you will teach, but if the standard you have to fulfill changed, that means you have to change your plans.
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