Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nobody wants to teach anymore

jessicalexicus.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

771–780 of 1001 posts

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#771

Post by enraged_camel »

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…

I deeply resent the fact that your comment is the top comment as of this writing. Nowhere in it have you acknowledged that the reason one third of teaching staff you interacted with were bitter political players was actually the entire topic of the article: the system has made them that way.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#772

Post by vehementi »

pojzon wrote: post #715
obscurette wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most of Eastern Europe countries teachers had lower salaries than average as far as we remember - ie at least since WWII. It's expected for most of us here. But that wasn't my point. 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.

30 years ago teachers were respected and parents trusted teachers with their kids. If the kid was misbehaving in class or getting bad grades -> was properly managed by parents. Right now parents are delusional about their kids. Blame teachers if something is wrong with the kid. Cant understand that most likely they are the issue why the kid is behaving this way. Dont want to take the blame. At least those are my obes…

Like other people in this thread I've had the idea of retiring early and having a second career as a teacher.

What if I did that, and then just refused to take any of that shit? Are teachers rare enough that I wouldn't get fired?

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#773

Post by baazaa »

xwdv wrote: post #316
baazaa wrote: post #273

Schools are just a place for warehousing kids; even people who take no interest in education know this from personal experience back from when they were a kid. Exactly 0 of 627 college students can answer simple questions like 'What is the name of the mountain range that separates Europe from Asia?' or 'What is the last name of the author of The Brothers Karamazov?'. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2…

> Exactly 0 of 627 college students can answer simple questions like 'What is the name of the mountain range that separates Europe from Asia?' or 'What is the last name of the author of The Brothers Karamazov?'. These simple questions that are just recitation of facts are worthless. I don’t even know the answers to these. The only questions that measure anything useful are critical thinking type questions, consider s…

Critical thinking is such a nebulous term there's not even an agreed-upon way of measuring it, much less old tests of it to compare against. It's largely been used by the educational establishment to justify why students come out of 13 years of compulsory schooling functionally innumerate and illiterate. Oh sure they don't know anything, but their critical thinking skills are off the charts!

If we use the slightly better-defined term of problem solving skills, there's no worse way of teaching that than putting a teacher up in front of 20 students teaching a standardised curriculum and giving out standardised tests. In the CS context, most students first learn how to think through a problem when they learn to code. What were they doing in school? Certainly not thinking through problems.

Edit: Also you completely misunderstood the import of those two questions. Anyone with a passing familiarity with world literature can answer the Dostoyevsky question, and anyone with a passing familiarity with geography or Russian history can answer the Urals question. You're note supposed to memorise the answer, the answer comes naturally if you're not pig-ignorant about the world. I wouldn't expect most students to know them, I sure as hell would expect more than 0.00% to know them. Kids know nothing because schools imbed extreme anti-intellectualism into even the brightest of kids.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#774

Post by Beltalowda »

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…

Every industry has good and bad workplaces, with good and bad cultures. Maybe 30 years ago it was a fine workplace and then two of the curmudgeons joined, drove out a lot of people who weren't curmudgeons, and 30 years later you've ended up with a bad culture filled with curmudgeons.

I don't know anything about teaching in the US, but I don't think one experience like that really says much about the industry as a whole: it just says something about that particular workplace.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#775

Post by cwmma »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #767
KennyBlanken wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, and hear me out: we could cut our military budget (which is larger than the next ten or so countries combined, both total and per capita) and start tipping the corporate tax share back towards the ~%50 it was sixty years ago and magically be able to: * pay teachers a fair wage * hire enough teachers, assistants, and admins so that teachers don't have to work at least another half a workday 'off the books' * fund…

I'm not familiar with US Private vs. Public schools so which one requires you to pay for the lunch? In many countries in Europe there are only public schools.

A public school in America (but not in England) is a state run school which may or may not have free lunches (it's often income related), Private schools are ones you pay to go to and tend to charge for food or order out for food.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#776

Post by kube-system »

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…

The $4000/student/year wasn’t a real figure, nor was it a reference to total costs per student (obviously schools have more than payroll costs)… it is the result of the two hypothetical numbers I gave when divided. Use whatever numbers you want, caring for special needs groups always costs way more per student than for others.

I disagree with the rest. Universal schooling is an important part of a health society. It is up to the government to provide adequate funding for its obligations. Systematically discriminating to ease budget constraints is not an ethical solution.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#777

Post by kjkjadksj »

obscurette wrote: post #718
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…

Youtube is about lecturing, not about teaching.

And increasingly about filling time to shoehorn in more monetization

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#778

Post by archduck »

dnissley wrote: post #713
Uehreka wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not GP, but I frequently start comments like this if the comment I’m replying to isn’t just slightly off, but reflects a deeply unexamined prior. It’s a signal that “The thing that’s wrong with your comment isn’t even in the text of the comment, it’s in the worldview that led you to think this in the first place. Simply reacting to the text of the comment would be insufficient.”

The problem is that this type of reply reflects your own deeply unexamined prior (e.g. that software can't play a part of solving this issue, or that anyone who said X believes Y, etc.), and so sets up an antagonistic interaction with the other person where you are each arguing from atop your ladders of inference, rather than climbing down those ladders and deconstructing those priors in more detail.

On the other hand, some contributions to a conversation are simply beyond the boundaries of common sense in such a way (blindingly obvious, unacceptable, dangerously naive, etc.) that ridicule is appropriate. Even if the contribution was made in good faith. Ridicule has numerous powerful social functions: it helps social groups self-govern, transmits knowledge from one generation to the next, enables social groups to circumscribe what is acceptable in a bottom-up way, and so on. Sometimes a little public skewering is exactly what's needed to give everyone something to think about. It's an online comment. Real names weren't used. There appears to be an overwhelming consensus as to the quality of the contribution (it's so light I can barely read it). No one's suffering any undue injury.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#779

Post by birdyrooster »

balfirevic wrote: post #295
birdyrooster wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never formed good habits and I really wish my parent prioritized that (Ritalin) over growing big and tall for a minuscule chance of making it in pro sports.

> over growing big and tall How does a parent prioritize their kid growing tall?

She claimed Ritalin and stimulants would stunt my growth

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#780

Post by Beltalowda »

d0mine wrote: post #679
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…

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 leverag…

> If you are saying that 100% of grading must be manual

That's not what was said though; I don't think anyone has a problem with some grading being automated (e.g. multiple-choice), and software has been used for decades for this kind of thing.

But there are serious limitations to this. If I solve a math problem in the correct way but made a silly mistake in the arithmetic leading to the wrong answer, then this is still a "correct" answer in a way, worth of some points.

And grading math is easy; how would you automate the grading of a question like "describe two reasons why the American settlers declared independence"?

Post reply on HN