Lots of comments to the tune of "pay teachers more." Teachers in large urban areas with strong unions tend to be paid quite well, especially factoring in benefits, and it doesn't necessarily correlate that well with various metrics of "success" in education (standardized test scores, on-time graduation rate, fewer violent incidents) once you look into individual cases and see through the administrative means by which those numbers can be rigged. Of course, there are markets where teachers make very little, with many needing to take second jobs, and I don't mean higher salary wouldn't help in those districts. I think the comments that speak to the respect for the profession, unreasonable accountability, and increasingly risky liability are more on the mark about why people jump ship when their career prospects improve in a strong economy.
Yep. Currently a teacher myself, and I'm seriously considering quitting after this year. I enjoy teaching, but there's just so much BS crap that I have to deal with. Parents here (rural area in a Southern state) have no desire for education and often think their kids shouldn't have to do anything to pass. So I constantly get emails from Little Johnny's mother about his math grade when Little Johnny literally hasn't picked up anything except his phone all damn year. But I can't tell her that, or if I do it doesn't matter ("He'd do great if you taught him real world stuff"). The huge culture of anti-intellectualism leads to a lack of respect here, as does the whole "Those who can, do" type attitude. IT sucks.
Thankfully, my district doesn't require lessons plans except for the classes we're being observed in. They give us the syllabus and trust us to teach it. I love this, as it gives me the freedom to try and be creative and spend as little or as much time as I need on a topic, without being rigid in how I approach it. Sadly, a new hire last year came in and wants to change all that; we're now forced to give standardized tests across the same class (so all geometry teachers must give the same test), which implies we have to do it on the same day...So someone either ends up going too slow or too fast. It was damn annoying, and thankfully I'm leaving that department next semester (I'm certified for both math and science, so am moving to the latter).
And then there's education classes. They're all jokes, and the "research" is so BSed it's not even funny. And the writing quality of the Ed.D.s wouldn't fly for an undergrad at any top 20 school. It's hilarious, and they're all quite useless, and just talk about "theories" and never explain anything practical (laws, for instance, would be damn nice).
>And then there's education classes. They're all jokes, and the "research" is so BSed it's not even funny.
I knew someone who was taking these classes, they said the same thing. One time I saw a great takedown of education studies, but I could never find it again. Do you have any examples of or links describing the phenomenon how atrociously bad the education of educators is?
I don't know if you meant this one[0], but it's well known among maverick ed. researchers. Even though it focuses on special education, it generalizes well (and SpEd in fact has some of the highest quality research, because kids with diagnosed disabilities are much less likely to succeed when more politicized, faddish, and unproven methods are used).
That's an interesting article, though I think I would disagree with assumptions 3 and 4, at least as they apply towards non-special needs secondary school children.
But, that said, I agree with all 10 of his misguided notions. They're all issues. As a math teacher, I've mostly seen issues with 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 and 10, though they others have been prevalent some (except the special needs one; I have not worked in a special needs class nor have I had a collaborative class with special education students, only ESL learners). And number 3 especially hits a point with me, as so many of my students don't have fluency in basic math and it makes teaching Algebra 2 and Geometry a real pain in the ass.
That's an interesting article, though I think I would disagree with assumption 3, at least as they apply towards non-special needs secondary school children.
Unfortunately I don't, but I'd love to find that link you mentioned.
As to my own experience with them, they're all very generalized and often don't actually test how well a student has learned something. I see these a lot with tech use. Calculators help test scores, but do students actually learn how to do the math? No, take away the calculator and see; often they can't even do basic multiplication without their fingers.
Or you'll see studies generalized from groups of 10 students, without taking other variables into count. I remember one where 20 kids improved after a certain strategy in an upper middle class private school. Authors then said this is the wya to do things and it should be implemented in lower socioeconomic class schools too.
And then the results often aren't meaningful and often feel forced, and really depend on how students feel on a given day and such... A student can easily bomb a test if they couldn't sleep the night before, and that score shouldn't show that they didn't necessarily learn with the intervention tested or whatever.
And that's just the studies. The actual classes are worse. I've learned nothing about education theory, and it's mostly just random teachers pushing their philosophy of teaching on us, or spouting off the research that agrees with it. And half my classes have been irrelevant. I teach high school math/science, and at least half my classes have been solely dedicated to elementary school apps/content. The one sole HS class I've taught was a joke where the teacher just went into how good dual credit was and how all HS should basically become community colleges... Without realizing that it isn't that way everywhere (our school's, for instance, is a joke and half of them don't transfer to other schools in-state).
In the area I taught, median pay was about $60k/yr. After 20 years and getting more advanced degrees, you could get to $80k/yr. Most of the teachers I worked with worked more hours per year than just about any software engineer I know. Only very lazy or very tenured teachers were getting the fabled summer vacation or winter break. I have more income, more vacation, and better hours as a developer than I ever did as a teacher
Similar situation. After leaving teaching for development I spent the first two years in something like a state of grace. I loved teaching, but my gosh, the stress levels weren't even in the same universe.
Yeah, the pay is an issue. Sure, I make great money for a single young male living in an low COL area, but there's no room to scale. My mom retired from teaching in the same district I'm currently in with 31 years experience. She was only making 15k more than I started at. There's no chance to increase pay apart from going administration (and even then it's not a huge increase) or getting more degrees (and there's a limit to those).
> Using data from the American Time Use Survey, I find that teachers work an average of 34.5 hours per week on an annual basis (38.0 hours per week during the school year and 21.5 hours per week during the summer months).
I don't understand the numbers. A typical highschool teacher is on campus from 7am to 3pm minimum. That is 40 hr/wk. That allows a 30min break for lunch and typically one hour "planning period" that is insufficient for handling all lesson planning, grading, and assessment stuffs. I'm left questioning the validity of the responses to the ATS. Multiple teachers I've talked with report earning less than minimum wage after counting all the everything they do. For the ATS responses to be counted, the "households that have completed all eight months of the Current Population Survey (CPS)." That feels like a pool of respondents that will self select out very busy people.
Anecdotally, I routinely work 50-60 hours a week as a high school level English teacher a suburb of a major metropolitan city. That’s excluding my 20 minute lunch period.
