Nobody wants to teach anymore

I'm sympathetic to what I guess are these issues but the article was like WAT?

> The shortages have started hitting colleges

> They’ve never paid us a living wage

Google's average college teacher's salary. Looks like a living wage to me. I see $73k to $250k

I guess the author meant public K-12 schools in which case it's probably right? Though the first Google says average in California is $82k (not sure that is or is not a living wage)

> When I tell someone I’m a teacher, they don’t say anything along the lines of “thank you for your service.” No, they usually talk about how much they hated school. They complain about your summers off.

Really? I've never heard anyone disparage teachers but maybe I'm out of the loop

> Most Americans don’t think teaching is a real job. They think schools exist in order to warehouse children while their parents do the real work, and to keep them out of trouble.

I've never heard this. I've heard people complain that's all they're allowed to do in some schools because discipline is disallowed but I've never heard anyone say teaching wasn't a real job. In fact I've only ever heard the opposite. It's one of the toughest jobs there is, in part because it's more than 40hrs a week

> Burnout is just victim blaming.

I've never heard that ever

Am I supposed to read between the lines of the hyperbole?

> Every single teacher I know has a second or third source of income,

This I do know. Even long decades ago my teachers all had second jobs.

> what really drives teachers out of the profession... is lack of autonomy.

Yes, i've heard that at least

I guess I'm just ranting that the post seems kind of incoherent. I don't have a solution. Move to Norway or some other place where they value teachers. The USA seem over in so many ways and I see no possible way it's going to get better.

Different data showing the same thing, Finish teachers are not paid well: https://www.chalk.com/resources/most-least-paid-teachers-in-...

I don't believe this was a case of bullying at all. It was a light ribbing. It also aligned with an archetype (of being able to engineer our way out of human problems) that's especially salient for some people on here, yet totally lost on others. The contradiction is funny, too, because it's classic human folly. Whether or not the commenter is anything like that really doesn't figure into the calculus of how necessary or good this instance of another commenter's snarky side comment was: there are no material consequences, no damage to anyone's reputation (except for some votes), and no one was even the butt of a joke here - it was the idea of the smart engineer with the engineered solution to a human matter which doesn't need solving. That's what we're laughing about.

Regarding all the talk about ridicule, it was intended as a rebuttal to the idea that humor at someone's expense is _never_ appropriate. It is appropriate and even healthy for a society to be composed of individuals who can withstand a bit of a ribbing when they unwittingly find themselves representing human folly in one of its many forms, and who can stop and ask, why did that happen?, and potentially learn from it, if it came from a moment of lacking self-awareness, or if it was just bad luck (everyone - everyone - winds up in the crosshairs sometimes.)

Truly no ill will meant, just wanted to defend the social function of ridicule. It probably ended up being a lot more of a well, actually thing than I intended. Which I do get teased for sometimes.

I said it before and will say it again: the way public high schools are arranged is cruel towards both the kids and the adults. (Also counterproductive, but first of all, cruel.)

Teenagers are forced into groups of the same age, within 1 year tolerance. This is the age of learning of social structures, building social ties, learning about various forms of social status, etc. They need to be inside a rich social structure to learn all that.

Instead, they are locked up with their peers, and a lonely adult. What can they do?

Of course they try to build various social structures of themselves, but since they are all peers in most regards, the only structure they can build is a gang. The more bold (and often violent) becomes a leader, others follow.

The only way to raise in status is to join a gang, and fight for a higher rung, or to start a gang. The more violent gang leaders do everything to make actual learning seen as despicable, because they'd hate to see a competing hierarchy based on academic success. Confronting the lone adult, a dangerous but not too dangerous enterprise, becomes a way to show bravery to others.

While some students may cause more problems and be more prone to violence than others, the cause is not the presence of such students, like presence of oil is not a cause of a fire. It's the system, the way classes are formed, that ignites them.

BTW 100-150 years ago high school was elective and required certain determination to get into it. This is why it did not show these problems so much: the students joined because they valued the academic success hierarchy, and could form structures along attaining better grades at the very least. (A teacher had many more violent response options, too.) But today's public high schools receive students with different incentives, even filtered against attaining academic success, because kids who eagerly want to learn go to various competitive high schools (charter, Catholic, private).

This is very sad, both because it keeps happening, and because nobody is coming up with a better structure, it's not a topic of a wide discussion in the society.

You, like most people, fundamentally misunderstand what teachers do.

You cannot amplify the powers of a single teacher because that's not how CHILDREN function.

The children's need for 1-on-1 human interaction to support their development is the fundamental bottleneck. The reason class sizes matter is because they directly affect the quantity of direct interaction each child receives.