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Nobody wants to teach anymore

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Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#891

Post by midoridensha »

SamBam wrote: post #850
midoridensha wrote: post #806

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) No, it's not. Russia, Israel, and Saudi Arabia all spend more as a percentage of GDP on their militaries than America.

How can you say "No, it's not," when OP provided a very clear definition of how they're measuring ("both total and per capita") and you provided a completely different one ("as a percentage of GDP").

When America isn't even near the top of spending-per-GDP, there's no way it's higher than all the other countries combined in per-capita spending.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#892

Post by dano »

Jill_the_Pill wrote: post #380
gshubert17 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I taught computing for 13 years at a public charter high-school. It doesn't charge tuition (it's a public school), but does have a dress code, and a commitment to a curriculum based on E. D. Hirsch's core knowledge program in grade school and on classical, liberal arts great books in high school. Admission is by lottery if there are more applicants than places, not by cherry-picking applicants. They hire teachers wit…

Open lottery admission isn't the same as universal retention. Some charters and even magnets later "counsel out" admitted kids who act up, perform poorly on tests, or need expensive extra services, saying the school isn't the right fit for them. Traditional district public schools don't have this option and usually wind up taking back the kids who wash out of the choice schools.

I have certainly heard this from some teachers in non-charter schools, and I've seen one student asked not to return to the charter school where I teach part-time.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#893

Post by technick »

Nobody should want to teach at the current pay rate offered and the lack of f*cks given for their mental and physical health, workload, student counts and support. My wife taught for 12-13 years and now coordinates for special education kids in her district, but her pay is tied to the teachers pay scale. Her district gave out 2% raises this year, in a record inflation year, she's making less than she did 3 years ago at this rate. I'm on the side of letting our education system collapse and get rebooted, teachers need to be treated better, way better. Kids should value education, and if they don't want to be there, kick them out. Teachers are not day care.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#894

Post by ndriscoll »

atoav wrote: post #249
yonaguska wrote: post #241

> States banned math books for being too woke. > being asked to breathe children’s germs Ok. This article is basically a long rant, and this kind of teacher is exactly what contributed to the burning out of my wife as a teacher. She wanted to teach math, but was being asked to teach social justice math. > I mean, they’re letting anyone in the classroom now. I’m surprised they haven’t started recruiting the homeless.…

What would "social justice math" look like? Serious question, I can't even imagine. Here in Europe math education hasn't changed a ton in the past decades at all.

Presumably things like California's proposed new math standards documents[1]. In chapter 7 (for 11-13 year olds) there are examples like this:

> BLUE Family: 2 adults; 2 children You are a Latinx family with two children under the age of five. Mom stays home to take care of the children. Dad works 40 hours per week at a construction company that pays two times minimum wage for nontipped employees.

> YELLOW Family: 1 adult You are a young, single Black woman who is going to school part time and working full time (40 hours per week). You work at the same construction company as the dad of the BLUE family, but most Black women (including you) make 64 percent of what men at the company make.

i.e. the government encouraging flamebaiting over race/sex. The example goes on to have children conclude the minimum wage is unfair and encourage them to write letters to their representatives about raising it based a comparison of wages to cost of rentals in Chicago.

Mind you, when this proposal was making the rounds a couple years ago, I looked up rentals in Chicago and found plenty at a fraction of the quoted numbers for the exercise, but the point of the exercise is to teach children the virtues of activism, not to teach them to use math to understand their world.

[1] https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#895

Post by idontpost »

gnubison wrote: post #859
areoform wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not, YouTube is not good pedagogy. A YouTube video doesn't help you to fill in the gaps of your understanding by re-working a difficult concept with you. A YouTube video, nor an app, doesn't go through the steps of solving a problem with you, and watch how you do it to give you constructive criticism. Educational content is amazing, but it's not teaching. It's a resource. It's like saying that the exist…

I agree with the core idea of this, but have you personally watched 3B1B? It feels to me like a largely isolated case, and I hope “remote learning” does not become the norm, but … it is really amazing.

It's also very limited in scope compared to actual math courses.

It's a supplemental resource, not core instruction.

Don't try to make it into something it was never intended to be.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#896

Post by idontpost »

missedthecue wrote: post #770
radiojasper wrote: post #460

Pay them more. Then while you're at it, pay police more as well. The two pillars that should keep our systems together are disgustingly underpaid... High School Teachers earned an average salary of $67,340 in 2020. Comparable jobs earned the following average salary in 2020: Elementary School Teachers made $65,420, Middle School Teachers made $64,990, School Counselors made $62,320, and Sports Coaches made $47,100. T…

What's the minimum offer it would take for you to quit your job and go be a middle school teacher right now?

About $400k.

That's double what I'm paid now, but I used to be a high school teacher and it was twice as much work (as measured by mental and emotional strain, not hours) as my job now.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#897

Post by archduck »

dnissley wrote: post #870
archduck wrote: post #856

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

I'm certainly no fan of shutting people down for asking questions. I think we may be interpreting the context of the question differently though. The parent poster was recounting having worked as a math teacher, stressed out every day from the planning and grading demands of the job, working in excess of 12 hours per day, earning a salary low enough that colleagues without a spouse's income to help out had to work a second job - and who still has nightmares about being back in the classroom. And then moving on to a software job with double the salary and half the stress. I read it as saying teachers should be appreciated / paid more and the response as why are teachers still doing unnecessary grunt work, making lesson plans and grading papers? Isn't that dumb work that a software engineer could just solve for them?

(Also, following through on this, if such a solution - computers planning your lessons for you, so all you have to do is what the smart computer tells you to - were to become reality, the lack of teacher appreciation / salary, which was the main point of the parent comment, would not improve at all - it would likely get worse, with teachers getting paid less for fewer available jobs. The deskilling of labor would probably follow, reducing teacher roles to individual, specialized, repetitive tasks, since it saves an enormous amount of money if low-skilled workers can simply be swapped out if they don't work out.)

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#898

Post by ALittleLight »

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…

I will never understand why teachers both do lots of extra work and complain about it. Teachers aren't slaves. If your job requires you to work 12 hour days quit and do something else. If you like working that hard, then why complain?

Plus, my own experience in the public school system as a student tells me not all teachers are working 12, or even 8, hour days. Again, if you want to be a good teacher - why complain that it's hard? Just be the best teacher you can with eight hours of work. It's not like teachers are fired for being bad.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#899

Post by idontpost »

douglaswlance wrote: post #729
zweifuss wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning is social. Very close to 100%. That is why the Nuremberg funnel was never really invented. Technology as a teacher substitute has never proven itself in practice (i.e. outside of laboratory environments). There are a few students that are exceptionally driven, but even they learn socially. That we have tried to get better schools by economy of scale and standardized testing is reason for some of the problems…

Not sure how this is relevant. The more automation, the more free time, the more people are able to be social.

You cannot automate human interaction. Children learn through human interaction.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#900

Post by ilaksh »

PuppyTailWags wrote: post #879
ilaksh wrote: post #867

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sc…

My understanding is that juvenile prisons have not been evidenced in decreasing the amount of crime? Generally my understanding is that children who severely misbehave is actually an indication of neglect, abuse, or something else seriously wrong with the environment that the child cannot escape.

If that's the case then it's too bad. Better for them to be in juvenile prison than stealing from or assaulting students and teachers.
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