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Nobody wants to teach anymore

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Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#861

Post by justin66 »

lr4444lr wrote: post #596
justin66 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In cases where they don't receive it though, they're not paying into it either. If the "it" you're referring to is social security, this is, to use your phrase from above, "patently untrue." It would be comforting if that were the case, but there are cases where a person who has paid into social security will not receive anything from it, and will not receive their spouse's Social Security survivor's benefits, unde…

Not disagreeing with what you just wrote above,but do you have a source for > If the "it" you're referring to is social security, this is, to use your phrase from above, "patently untrue." ? Because everything I am reading suggests those states whose teachers whose work years only go to pension and not SS eligibility are not having their teachers pay into SS.

That part is right! The problem comes at the end of a career when the SSA needs, under the WPA rules, to weigh what the teacher in question is going to be paid by the teacher’s pension (which by design was paid into instead of social security) against what the teacher paid into social security via payroll taxes before or after their career as a teacher, or during summer work during their career as a teacher. The SSA then reduce the social security benefits according to their formula. The reduction can be pretty extreme, all the way towards a person who paid into the social security trust not receiving any benefit from it.

I’m not fully familiar with the stated justification for these laws, or why you’d want to treat a pension as a ”windfall,” (or maybe they’re trying to keep social security benefits from being a “windfall?”) but I guess my main thought on that as a non-teaching, non-union professional is that we are all very lucky these rules were drafted a year or two before 401ks came into wide use, such that we avoided someone in congress getting the bright idea of treating our tax deferred retirement savings as a “windfall” to be factored into the SSA’s payment calculations as well.

I believe the problem of losing a spouse’s survivor’s benefits happens under the GPO rules, and that is similarly unpopular.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#862

Post by kweingar »

nemothekid wrote: post #652
8note wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Send the kid home and fail them for the year? They can try again next year. Well behaved kids are the parents' problem

A secondary problem is that public schools have essentially transformed into state nannys. 1. You can't send the kids home because both parents are probably working. It's more likely the kid becomes lost forever and it becomes a government problem again once that kid is now living an alternative lifestyle that consumes government resources in other ways (crime, homelessness, or health). 2. Because of the realities of…

> I think a lot of problems with child education and just be traced back to economic realities of many parents today.

This is it. Our framework for understanding childhood success is based entirely in “school quality”. If a child enters adulthood with a criminal record, without job skills, or without prospects for higher education, it is always blamed on either the parents or the school system. The only remedies anyone can imagine is throwing money at the school system or setting up charter schools, so when that doesn’t work, you’re left guessing.

But none of this addresses poverty! I am convinced that if children can go to sleep with food in their belly, stable housing, and proper healthcare, they’re much more likely to have good outcomes.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#863

Post by klipt »

Wistar wrote: post #696
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."

Maybe teachers in the minority gender experience less positive interactions with certain colleagues than teachers in the majority gender?

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#864

Post by idontpost »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #853
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…

How does the education most Americans get K-12 compare to other G20/OECD countries? Unless I'm wrong, we're like #15 or worse in a lot of educational benchmarks, right? What could federal/state/local governments do (other than divert money from wealthy areas into poorer areas) to make American children receive a more "world class" K-12 public education?

Stop squeezing families economically into poverty traps for corporate benefit.

Squeezed families can't raise mentally healthy kids.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#865

Post by UtopiaPunk »

I sometimes wonder if I would make a good teacher. Teaching others is something I enjoy, I've worked with kids a few different times in my life and it seemed positive for everyone, and a college professor I admired said multiple times that I would make a good teacher.

I have several teachers in my family, and while they feel fulfilled teaching children (and I envy that fulfillment) , the pay is disrespectful. Furthermore, the administration above them seems like a special kind of hell that could only be spawned by public-private partnerships that neoliberalism loves. The past few years have been particularly rough, as bizarre alt-right politics from parents has to be constantly addressed (ranging anger about masks to anger about CRT to anger). Mix in the lingering anxiety of school shootings (and the its constant reminder by the presence of SROs, aka cops), and it really seems miserable.

I think teaching is one of the most important vocations in constructing and maintaining a healthy and vibrant society. But the invisible hand of the market has determined that I will make more money and have less stress by answering customer support emails. Seems whack

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#866

Post by Ekaros »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #3

Teaching/training is quite difficult. I've done quite a bit of training (but not true teaching -there's a difference), over the years. My family is full of teachers. I have many friends that are teachers. It's amazing how "solutions" never seem to actually get around to simply paying teachers more, and maybe not expecting them to be child-rearers, in lieu of parents.

I don't actually think the money is main problem. You can keep giving them more money and it wont change anything in long run. Unless they are grossly underpaid compared to cost of living.

It is all about giving them tools to solve issues with those children that cause issues. And maybe cultural change back to state where it is most of the time kids fault. Not teachers... And lessening the work load where possible. Maybe increasing number of assistants available and resources of special education.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#867

Post by ilaksh »

draebek wrote: post #535
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…

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…

I think you are right. But the kids who are involved need to actually be held responsible.

In middle school I was a kind and polite person. There were a significant portion around me who were not. And more than enough who were literally underage criminals. Many abused the teachers, especially ones who were having a tough time such a chemotherapy.

Stealing by middle schoolers should result in imprisonment of middle schoolers. Same thing for locking a teacher out of her classroom.

I'm not joking. I think we need to start building more juvenile prisons. It will cut down a lot on the requirements for adult prisons. If there is any capability for reform, it is much greater when they are young.

It also needs to be clear to juveniles that they can't commit crimes and have them dismissed as "poor classroom control".

It's garbage juveniles is what it is. Take the trash out.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#868

Post by rr808 »

Ekaros wrote: post #846
rr808 wrote: post #842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are Finland's schools like my city? 30% of its children descendants of slaves? + 10% illegal immigrants? A good few percent homeless, parents in jail and/or hard drug addicts. 20% with both parents working 100 hours between them. Some bring guns to school. Teaching isn't all about teaching.

30% descendants of slaves? You mean their parents were slaves? I really recommend you moving out of such third world society. If they had slavery this millennia they can not be saved.

Not parents, descendants. Yes its been 150 years, but the scars still haven't healed.

> I really recommend you moving out of such third world society.

Well this is the challenge in America and why Finland's education system has it easy. The teaching in Finland doesn't have to be good to beat an average US student.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#869

Post by csa »

Beltalowda wrote: post #812
logicalmonster wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a European, it has always been perplexing to me how little the US invests in teachers and schools, given that we know how huge the benefits are down the road (educational attainment, income, pro-social behavior, life satisfaction). 1) European perspectives on a lot of American problems miss one of the biggest differences between us: you have a lot more of a homogeneous population. There's numerous differences be…

> There's numerous differences between designing a school system for basically all Hungarian or all Norwegian kids, for example, and figuring out what the hell you can do with a school mixed with Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites with all different levels of interests, drive, and ability. Why would Latinos, Asians, Blacks, and Whites all require a radically different education? It seems to me that math is math, you…

> It seems to me that math is math, your country's history is your country's history, biology is biology, etc.

You would think, but somehow we Americans have found a way to make this question much more difficult than it initially seems (or needs to be, imho).

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#870

Post by dnissley »

archduck wrote: post #856
dnissley wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why was this instance a good use case for ridicule? As you admit, the question asker might very well have been genuinely curious. The answer to their question doesn't seem blindingly obvious to me (although I can certainly speculate about good reasons that grading isn't automated). I can't tell what you mean by "unacceptable" (perhaps there is some cultural taboo you're referring to here?). And it also doesn't seem "…

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 necessar…

I think the issue here is that I fundamentally disagree with the direction of this particular ribbing. I think we should be sensitive to this kind of naive questioning, which comes from a good place (wanting to make teaching easier and more effective) and can lead down productive paths where our priors are deconstructed such that we change what we think of as possible. We work in an industry where rabbits have been pulled out of hats and geese have laid golden eggs, by which I mean people have put their minds to hard problems and have come up with solutions that before seemed impossible and would have faced the ridicule that you're defending. To the extent that ridicule causes people to be less curious, we should be very careful about deploying it.
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