5 ms·
This was really painful to read. I don't often think I have vision or significant insight, but it's been obvious to me for as long as I can remember that egreg
by b6 11y ago
This was really painful to read.
I don't often think I have vision or significant insight, but it's been obvious to me for as long as I can remember that egregious use of technology in classrooms is a profoundly terrible idea. What, educators were worried children wouldn't spend enough time staring at glowing rectangles, and needed to get a head start? Really?
It's not clear whether most adults are even capable of making good decisions about what technologies to invite into their lives. Inflicting computers and software on children in a classroom, I think, demonstrates either profound lack of understanding about the state of these technologies, or judgement, or both.
Pens, pencils, crayons, markers, paper, books, musical instruments. These are the kinds of things that belong in classrooms. Children should be reading and drawing and building and talking and playing creatively, learning to think and solve problems based on experiencing the world directly, not trying to sip secondhand information through the straw of a screen, not wasting time with the latest malware and ads and passwords and an infinite amount of other stupid computer bullshit. Technology is a kind of heroin-like thing you should choose to invite into your life later as an adult if you want, not inflicted on you as a child.
- Allegrippus 11y agoAnd what's a "gathering rug", anyway? Are desks too rough on their little sissy rear ends?
- panzagl 11y agoTablets are just the next step in replacing teachers with their exorbitant $40K salaries with half that number of $10/hr babysitters, so more money can be funneled to the companies providing the curriculum and testing.
- lintiness 11y agocities like chicago have near 3% property taxes to pay current teachers average salaries over $75k/yr. with health, with vacation, with summers, with cola, with lifetime guaranteed pensions of 70%+. school admins routinely take home $125k+. when are we going to stop with the nonsense that teachers save the world while starving in their yugos?
- coldpie 11y agoWhen it stops being true, I imagine. http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary http://www.payscale.com/research/US/All_K-12_Teachers/Salary
- lintiness 11y agohttps://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_083.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d11/tables/dt11_083.asp how about using a real source. payscale.com?
- coldpie 11y agoSo bizarre that you used a specific outlier case of $75-125k, more than twice what the actual average is. And given that your outlier exists, I wonder what that says about teacher salaries on the lower end of the bell curve given the average of $55k.
- lintiness 11y agono idea what you're talking about. your number fits a ba with zero experience on a national average. teachers make a lot more with even limited experience in big population areas (with politicians on the dole) with corresponding higher cost of living (ie. chicago, where i stated).
- coldpie 11y agoI'm saying your original example was specifically crafted to make people think teachers are well-paid ("average salaries over $75k... school admins routinely take home $125k") by cherry-picking a specific outlier. When I called you on it, you found real data showing the average is actually $55k, which means many salaries are even lower than that. Now you've backpedaled so far as to say the average teacher salary is roughly equivalent to "a ba with zero experience," which I would categorize as criminally underpaid for a position so crucial to the upbringing of our country's children.
- dghughes 11y agoGood teachers are hard to find even when I was in high school in the 1980s I had quite a range. Compare three math teachers I had. One teacher was so laid back he played music in class but it was 1960s music, nobody in the entire class got over 40%. The second math teacher was also a university professor he was so strict many in his class failed too. The third was a bit geeky in behaviour, a bit eccentric, he would "pick volunteers" three of them to solve problems on the blackboard at the front of the class. I can't recall anyone in that class getting under 90%.