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Nobody wants to teach anymore

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Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#951

Post by erdos4d »

rayiner wrote: post #941
erdos4d wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same experience here going to school in the 90s, but I have the exact opposite take. I was taught to question authority and think this was one of the few really important lessons I received from school. I think that's why I was instinctively able to see through all the flag waving conformism after 9-11 and the current MAGA death cult. The lack of critical thinking I see from so many of my peers didn't arise from bein…

The "MAGA death cult" is literally the product of questioning authority. It's a situation where the establishment has lost control, leaving a vacuum of authority filled by TV personalities, conspiracy theorists, and complete randos.

I disagree. From what I can see, it looks like they just replaced the old boss with the new boss. They still follow Trump just as slavishly as they used to follow the old elite, they even show their fealty by playing russian roulette with covid, and losing at a predictable rate, hence the "death" part of the cult. I see no evidence the anti-authoritarian nature of the movement is real at all, they just have a new boot to lick.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#952

Post by tptacek »

msrenee wrote: post #937
tptacek wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've looked at a bunch of them (I have this argument somewhat frequently). But, sure: let's find some examples. What's a major metro where you think teachers probably get a raw deal? This is easy data to pull up.

I know OPS in Omaha doesn't pay crap. Last year's pay schedule started at $43k with a bachelor's, 47k with a master's, and 51k with a doctorate. Maxes at $71,400 with a doctorate. 2022-23 starts at $44k with a bachelor's and maxes at 75k with a doctorate.

I'm not at all surprised if teachers in Nebraska get a shittier deal than teachers in California or Illinois, but if you click around the financials for the DC West school district, teachers in suburban Omaha are routinely making 85k+. These teachers do not have doctorates. Note that the base salary of a teacher is just the floor on their compensation; they make substantial additional money from extracurriculars and in-school mentoring work.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#953

Post by albrewer »

I wanted to be a teacher when I was in high school (and I still do; I like teaching people new things). Then I found out brand new engineering graduates made more than any adult employed by the school district except for the superintendent and high school head principal.

I still want to teach, but taking the 70% pay cut required to do it does not make sense.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#954

Post by gumby »

pnf wrote: post #942
gumby wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What has “urban” to do with it?

The parent comment answers itself. They would choose it because they actually don't have the alternative choice. In fact, aside from the transient young Teach for America type affluent idealists, most (not "all") urban public school teachers are gloried babysitters making good babysitting wages. If they teach kids anything it's usually something that should be untaught asap. By and large, the long hauler, professiona…

And non-urban schools are somehow different?

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#955

Post by lostcolony »

diognesofsinope wrote: post #261
lostcolony wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Counterpoint: teachers' pay is great, it's just backloaded in pension plans. Yet another counter counterpoint - there are still companies and government jobs with defined pension plans that pay far more than teachers. Even without those, there are still many, many jobs requiring a comparative amount of education, far fewer hours worked, and pay more even once you subtract maximizing 401k contributions yearly (let a…

Half the reason to be a teacher is because half the job is having fun. Most curricula is set in stone and requirements are nationally standardized (US and Asia). You more or less get summers off (there are conferences and summer school) and there are almost no jobs where you can take ~1.5 months off every year. Teaching is also one of the few steady jobs in rural America. I feel like most people haven't been in an ac…

"Half the job is having fun"

You know, having known and being related to multiple teachers, I've not heard any of them express it as -fun-. Meaningful, important, challenging, yes, but not 'fun'. The two college professors I know have expressed it a such, but that's it. Of the teachers I had, I could see some of the advanced placement ('gifted') teachers viewing it as fun, because we were generally well behaved and smaller class sizes, but even there a common through line was taking advantage of the class' temperament and offloading the curriculum back onto us (i.e., "pick a topic in (X) to teach to everyone").

There is a tradeoff in lesson planning; there are resources around the proscribed curriculum (i.e., teach to the book), but that is decidedly not fun or interesting and the kids -will- misbehave more; the alternative for most classes (the advanced placement as mentioned above notwithstanding) is to prep something more interesting, but that requires using more time outside the classroom for 'work'.

Outside of the workday, which runs from 7-3:30 or so (and sometimes both before and after, if there are faculty meetings and things, or if they recruit from the teaching pool to help with kid drop off/pick up), there is grading, so it is not uncommon for a teacher's workday to run close to 12 hours.

You do, as you say, get summers off, but again, nearly all the teachers I know use that time to look for summer jobs, because the pay is so poor. Sometimes it's summer school or just independent tutoring, sometimes it's service industry work; nothing quite like running into your students from the prior year while handing their mom their McDonald's from the drive through. The only teacher I know who didn't (recently retired) do that had inherited their house, so had no rent/house payment to make, and -could- live, frugally, on a teachers' salary.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#956

Post by dhosek »

xhevahir wrote: post #839
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've wondered if the onerousness of lesson planning is due in part to the extremely fragmented nature of American education, where every school district formulates its own curriculum. I'd be curious to know what it's like for teachers who teach a standardized, national curriculum like France's.

I don’t know, although there are some rigidly standardized curricula in use in the US. One is in military base schools—since kids might move from virtually any school in the system to another, the curriculum has been designed so that, e.g., every Algebra I classroom covers the same material on the same day and every Freshman English class is reading the same book at the same time.

The other case is the Integrated Math curriculum which specifies lesson plans on a daily basis.

I have no direct experience with either.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#957

Post by dhosek »

midoridensha wrote: post #891
SamBam wrote: post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

>USA's military spending in 2021 hit $801bn a year, says the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In comparison Russia's military spending in 2021 hit only $66bn.

US population: 329.5 million, Russian population: 144.1 million,

Per capita spending US: $24,600. Russia: $458

While I’m at it: US GDP: 20.94 trillion, 1.483 trillion

US military spending as percent of GDP: 3.8%, Russia: 4.5%

Now you can see how there is a way.

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#958

Post by dhosek »

cwmma wrote: post #775
galaxyLogic wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not often income-related, it’s always income-related. All public schools offer free/reduced price lunches and even schools in high-income areas will have some small number of students who qualify:

https://high-schools.com/directory/ca/cities/beverly-hills/b...

Although, after googling highest-income school district in the US, not all school districts do:

https://high-schools.com/directory/ny/school-districts/scars...

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#959

Post by horsawlarway »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #946
horsawlarway wrote: post #873

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also do not see the purpose of comparing prices for different prices of labor for justifying the prices. Then you're unable to see that market forces are making it incredibly unattractive to be a teacher. The comparison is to point out the following: Why bother to take loans for college, then complete the additional certifications required for teaching, only to spend more effort at a career that will pay you cons…

>Then you're unable to see that market forces are making it incredibly unattractive to be a teacher. Note that I agree with your statement of teachers not getting sufficient pay relative to quality of life at work. I even think this is true up and down, from daycare to physics high school. I disagree with the chain of reasoning to support this view, however. You cannot derive this conclusion by looking at the price o…

> The point of my initial response to you was that you cannot compare annual tuition for daycare or private high schools and determine which are appropriate prices. Staffing ratios, liability insurance costs, there are a myriad factors that render this line of thinking erroneous.

So I guess turn the question on its head - What makes you believe 13k is enough?

When the only viable comparisons we have in my area strongly hint that this is underpaying - both daycare and private schools are relatively close in terms of services provided, and they both cost more.

You've made a claim - I'm saying I don't really believe it. I've pointed to plenty of examples of why I don't believe it, but you've done nothing but attack those methods.

So, genuinely, what makes you think 13k/yr per kid is enough, what's the reasoning behind your argument?

Re: Nobody wants to teach anymore

#960

Post by dhosek »

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…

The material is not so static. Finding square roots by hand is no longer taught as part of the curriculum.¹ Interpolation from data tables is also not typically taught since students are expected to have a calculator that can at least handle trig functions and logarithms. Graphing calculators enable solving problems as part of classwork that weren’t possible before the calculator. When I was in high school, the lowest-level math class offered was Basic Math which didn’t even cover fractions. Some schools (but not the one I attended) topped out with AP Calculus BC which was roughly equivalent to a Calc II college class (integration and series). Now, the lowest-level math class available at the high school level is Algebra and students cannot graduate without passing Algebra and Geometry.² Some schools offer AP Calculus CD which covers multivariate calc (e.g., Calc III) as well as AP Statistics, neither of which existed when I was in high school.

⸻

1. I’m sure that there are occasional classrooms where this is still taught, but it’s more an enrichment topic than part of the curriculum.

2. I was in high school when Illinois raised its graduation requirement from one year of math to two years of math. The year after that happened, my high school began offering Basic Math 3/4 in addition to the Basic Math 1/2 class it had previously because too many kids were unable to do fractions.

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